Sven Johne: Vom Verschwinden

In Vom Verschwinden (“Of Vanishing”), an eleven-year-old boy tells three stories about his family: that of his great-grandmother Ida, that of his grandmother Angelika and that of his father. In all three, their personal fates bear witness to different phases in the history of East Germany after the Second World War.

In this work, Sven Johne, whose precise shots cast a calm, poetic gaze of reflection on himself as well as on social circumstances and their inherent changes, focuses on the living environment of his childhood.

The living environment is the Stubnitz, a woodland area on the island of Rügen, where the chalk cliffs form the rural border to the Baltic Sea. In the narrator‘s imagination, the forest is two things: a refuge and place of escape for his family from the realities of their lives but at the same time a repository of the very stories that are hidden within the trees and in the sea. The shots of the natural landscape of Stubnitz are the visual frame of the work and relates the family‘s stories to the “trees with ears” and the “brain of the sea”.

The end is the story of the boy, but also of his home‘s nature, which is changing due to the climate catastrophe. The question of the loss of both sides of the forest and its implications for him - and us - remains.

Selected by Cornelius Ferber (HMKV)

Sven Johne was born and raised in Bergen auf Rügen in 1976. From 1998 to 2006 he studied photography at the Academy of Visual Arts Leipzig under Timm Rautert and lives and works in Berlin. Exhibitions, prizes and the presence of his work in important collections have long established Johne‘s place in the national art scene, and he has been active internationally in Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg.

http://sven-johne.com