Paris resident photographer and artist Susanne Junker presents with 21ST CENTURY WOMAN a kind of personal diary. She began it in 2016 at Shoebox Studio in Paris and finished in March 2017 when the small studio in the Bastille closed. The book was published by Journal of Culture, a publishing company of Julia Scorna from Leipzig. Here on GoSee, we give you a bit of insight into the book, which can also be ordered as a limited and signed edition directly in her GoSeeSHOP.
We wanted to know the whole story behind the SHOEBOX. Susanne explains: "In 2016, I returned to Paris, after living in Shanghai for many years, and I was urgently looking for a work space. About 15 years before, I helped my friend Stéphane Coutelle to clear out a studio he had just rented close to Place de la Republique in Paris. The small room, hidden all the way back of an old building, was then, so it seemed, an illegal brothel. The space was divided into three separate booths. Yellowed and shabby erotic posters of asian women covered the walls, some of them soaked in splashes of frying oil. It smelled of grease and cheap sex. We aired it out, knocked down the temporary walls and transformed it into a tiny photo studio and Stéphane christened it: the shoebox."
The first photo in the book is a self-portrait, which was created for the Chinese New Year in February 2016 : "Me in a box, being shipped from Shanghai to Paris, and back into the Shoebox Studio..." We wanted to know, was that the end of the Shoebox? No, Susanne Junker laughed : "The more things change, the more they stay the same. Here I was, an eternity later, after traveling the world and living abroad in the same space that I helped renovate more then a decade ago. Simply being in this space again automatically forced me to confront and reflect on my work. How do I want to continue to pursue subjects that have interested me for many years."
The topics she dealt with during this period? Women, identity, body, beauty, age, androgenity, sex, censorship, sexism, feminism... The central series in the book 'RED PERFORMANCE OR THE SEARCH FOR THE CONTEMPORARY FEMALE BODY' is all about the color red, which for her is a way to express violence and blood, war and battle equipment.
Life as an artist has its perks and pitfalls. "Being an artist is hard. Being a female artist is even harder. I need to spend time with women who are changing the real world." Susannes Credo says in 2017. The artist is now on her way to China, where she led the experimental art space stageBACK in Shanghai from 2008 - 2013. First at the legendary 696 Warehouse, then in the famous gallery district M50. She'll probably bring us back a few new stories and visual impressions back from her travels. We will keep you posted.
10% of the proceeds from the book go to ONE SKY FOR ALL CHILDREN, an institution Susanne has supported for quite some time with all her heart. Here is a wonderful quote by founder Jenny Bowen about how her aid organization came into being : "I suppose I have a tendency to leap first and ask questions later. That’s how I, a middle-aged screenwriter of modest accomplishment – really an ordinary person in every way – through a gift of fate, became mother to a precious but wounded child from an orphanage in China. And that’s how I moved my family to China, determined to help the Chinese government re-imagine its entire child welfare system (and succeeded!) And it’s how I came to write a book, although I’d never written anything remotely like it before. And how I found myself driven to start a social action movement for the world’s most vulnerable and forgotten children." onesky.org
About - Susanne Junker is an artist with focus on photography. Born 1973 in Germany, she lives and works in Paris, France. Autodidact, her work concentrates on femininity and identity. Additionally, Junker founded and directed stage候台BACK, an art space for experimental projects in Shanghai, China from 2008 - 2013.
About - One Sky. A former screenwriter and independent filmmaker, Jenny founded One Sky in 1998 in order to give something back to China, her adopted daughters’ home country and to the many orphaned and abandoned children then languishing behind institutional walls. In 2008, Jenny received the Skoll Award for Social Entrepreneurship; she was chosen by popular vote to carry the Olympic Torch on Chinese soil; and in that same year, Half the Sky became one of only a handful of foreign NGOs officially recognized and legally registered by the Chinese government. onesky.org
The book - SUSANNE JUNKER '21ST CENTURY WOMAN - artist book, ISSN 1864–9883, EDITION No.1 / 75, PUBLISHER Journal of Culture, Leipzig / Germany... signed and available upon request with a dedication for 48 euros in her GoSeeSHOP (GoSee CHRISTMAS PROMOTIONAL OFFER : 38 euros !!)
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