As a former model, you created an inter-nationality of yourself, now visible in precise sides of your work. On a subjective map,where do you locate yourself as an artist?

I still consider myself as a model and not a former one. What has changed many years ago is that I also became the author of the model. The fact to be put into a certain drawer and be labeled as a "model" or a ex-model" or a "photographer" or a "gallerist" gives me a headache. Unfortunately the art world produces mainly people who can only function properly if they can categorize their opposite immediatly. But in times where brilliant art students become web designers and artists curators, everything is possible. This sentence: "she is coming from the fashion world" has been ignored by my "non studied art" ears for many years. I draw my own subjective map with pencils that don't follow the classic rules.

It seems that photography and exhibition of the self, “constructed”your former persona. Are you at the present time attempting to de-construct, or to re-construct yourself in relation to your newperceptions?

My work is very pragmatic. Lacking models made me use myself. I am a white canvas, available all the time at every intimate moment. That is not to beat. The figures and results can be "me" or can be staged to a point that I don''t recognize myself at all. The me within the living human is not important, the result is only what counts. And the path to get there can be "de" and "re" constructed

Susanne Junker uses self-staged images as a commutable pattern, but for emphasizing individual emotions and existential throbs. Are these egos submissive avatars, sexually-manipulated tools? Behind these scenes, do you actually hide the self sustainable resource that escapes the ideationand lingers its instincts on the creative course?

It is all about sex. I think about sex and sexual activity all the time. The visions of what has happened, what will happen, what won't ever happen. Positive sexuality as well as cruel and nasty sexuality in form of violation and not agreed by me. This is my source and so human. And humanity fascinates me and drives me crazy into disbelieve.

Surpassing the visually digestible image, you praise the aesthetics of ugliness, paying respect to the sincere apologetic, physically-reduced woman. What lies behind these low-resolution feminine characters?

What you can see in my images are feelings. What society calls "ugly" doesn't interest me. Ugly is only a word. But a feeling never cheats you. It is a seventh sense that maniacs made to catholicism, praying that the human race is not worthy and only redeemed after death. Growing up in Bavaria means that you see the crossed naked guy all the time. And you kneel. Therefor there are submissive characters inside me. And sometimes they show.

Using the body as an artistic expression, few artists in the late 60’s performed interventions over their limbs and complexions, suggesting both evanescent and actuation of human condition. Do you consider your body limits when creating art projects?

The ultimate self-portrait is the moment when the bullet hits the brain. The second when the bullet comes out again. A pair. It is fascination. As much as driving of a bridge with 200 km/h. Thus, creating feelings around this is enough for me for now.

Does your work stand as a manifesto for recovering the essentials of human existence or are you suggesting the development of a reversed creation, imprinted with mutations and new regulations?

Why are we all here? If you know who can answer this please send him or her my email. I don't want to suggest anything about something I don't understand but my work makes me play with the big question mark and luckely I at least enjoy that.

You have started off you artistic career on the thoughtful grave of another professional situation. Referring to your current activities, do you believe that you are completing your objectives? Do you feel like creating social engaged works, or moreover cathartic expressions?

As I mentioned, there was never a funeral of the old profession though ambitions and intensions change with time and uncontrollable moments are to cherish. stage候台BACK is a social engaged project and part of my art work. And I am looking forward to clutter rather then to solve.

Stage Back Shanghai is an art space designed for conjunction and exchange of trans-medial concepts. Conceiving this experimental situ brought you also the opportunity to refer your work to an international range of contemporary artistic and meta-cultural acts. How does the integration process function for you, as an artist habitually employing personal image to retrieve her?

stage候台BACK is a white cube but more so it is my concept. Other artists can grab it and play with it on their terms. This is my offer to them. In an ideal situation, a positive exchange happens between me and the artist on a creative and human basis. stage候台BACK mainly functions as a catapult to spread informations about foreign artists living and working in China. This is a niche crowed and new. And new situations make creative since the whole circus isn't set up yet. And that allows me to showcase my art and mixes this with a space to invite artists who have never been to China.

As a founder of Stage Back, what are your future projects for 2011? Are you planning to launch further activities? What is procedure for selecting participants?

stage候台BACK is located in an old ware house (696 Weihai Lu) that suffers the constant thread of demolition.

The leases given out to the artists and galleries last only 12 month and they are to be renewed at the end of every year. I haven't signed for 2011 yet. But we are hopeful that stage候台BACK is going to be able to continue its activities at its current location. For 2011 I would welcome to see stage候台BACK being active outside of China preferably in Germany to in hence the exchange step by step. stage候台BACK is an art space from an artist for artists. To realize a trip and a residency in Shanghai needs a lot of planning, effort and money. Both parties need to work equally on the ideas, creative direction and finances. Artists who expect a red carpet won't fit in our profile.

Interview by Silvia Pintilie

www.artclue.net

stage 候台BACK Gallery is pleased to announce founder and German artist Susanne Junker will present an exhibition entitled "MYSPACE" in the gallery, from April 30 until the gallery's closure on May 20. This will be the final installation in the stage候台BACK Weihai Road 696 space, as the Weihai Road 696 art studios are being closed on May 20, 2011.

The "MYSPACE" installation is a three dimensional portrait of the artist, and a part of Susanne Junker's bodysuit series. The exhibition theme expresses the artist's interpretation regarding herself, her body, existence, opinions and personal freedom. The work explores how some people, not only herself, are impacted by these matters. Using sex dolls, the original cast was for the Japanese market, with a functioning vagina, represents issues affecting women in modern society, such as rape, aggression and violence towards females.

As the last exhibition in the stage候台BACK space in Weihai Road, Junker also sees the installation as a silent protest against the loss of the space, and also comments on the art scene in general by creating a 'fuckable' artwork. She has commoditized her work into a three dimensional sculpture that represents herself and her own feelings of frustration and general disillusionment following the eviction of artists and galleries from the Weihai road 696 studio complex. Using a sex doll as the representation of this period of time in the development of Shanghai city and female individuals in general Junker hopes to create an iconic image of the development of the local society that gives audiences pause for thought on the various issues she would like to raise. The work is also a commentary on the growing predominance of social media globally in peoples lives.

Susanne Junker works internationally as a photographer. She has widely exhibited in Europe and the United States.

She created stage候台BACK as an artist run space to increase international dialogue and exchange in China, which she feels is still underdeveloped in Shanghai. During its short history, stage候台BACK has hosted a series of groundbreaking exhibition that have generated interest in the international art press and local media.

Text: Chris Gill (Art News Paper)

The artist Susanne Junker has embraced themes of gender identification, the objectivization of women & mediatic perversion of feminine sexuality in her work. While the inherent violence and suppression of women in contemporary media, as a self-engendering dichotomy within an industry predominantly male, are far from original themes in contemporary photography, the debased and intimate self-portraiture of the artist denotes an ironic, grotesque treatment of the subject.

In close observation of the ongoing series, “Figures for the base of a Crucifixion", the brutal and oppressive role of religious autocracy is depicted in staged creations; women of diverse origin portrayed by the artist as subject, robed in costumes which bear witness to the transnational, border less question of emancipation. Static, bound, constricted and labeled, the work is suggestive of predecessors of the feminist school, and the extremism achieves a definite shock value which, questionably appreciable amidst the plethora of similar treatments, holds visual appeal. That Susanne Junker is in herself the sole model in the work, whereby the frontiers of self-portraiture and subjective experience contrast and fuse with what appears to be an attempt to go beyond the self; to attain an objective retort wherein women regardless of origin may empathize with the personal/subjective, leaves ground for question.

Current work, such as "Me You Sex Friend Want”, is less blatant than the title may suggest. The boldness of color and frontal compositions familiar to the visual experience given by mass-media, found upon countless billboards and layouts of arts/cultural/fashion reviews, remain as in her previous work, yet the dimension of glass and plastic materials spattered, sprayed with foam, grease and unidentifiable matter further obscures the facial contortions of the artist. Artificial, crass & dramatic, the series appears as a “seduction "fantasist”, more intelligent than the bare stark self-portraiture which precedes its inception and current progress. Undoubtedly fresh, the multiplicity within the images allows for one to construe one’s own interpretation, a distinct evolution from the force and parallel violence of the staged imagery by which the artist had originally sought to address that of the industry she is so well acquainted, and survived.

Essentially, the photographic work of Susanne Junker is cathartic, humorous and violent in effect. Her trajectory is one wherein the role of subject/object, identity and transfiguration of medium revolve, intertwine and are re-cast in a conscious manner. Unfortunately, while the pivotal device of oscillating to and from established or fixed visual iconography-which she has sought to challenge of women, embodying the same formal vocabulary in her staged self-portraiture, one might evaluate that rather than a rupture with the perversion and vulgarity of the portrayal or women by mass-media and the “victimization” of the fashion world in real terms on both the physical and psychological landscape of women, conversely, her work is somewhere testament to the legacy of that sphere upon contemporary photographic art.

To quote McLuhan:…"the medium is the message”, while the sincerity of the artist is unquestionable, the relative naivety or brutal force latent in her work leaves one in doubt as to whether or not Susanne Junker has in truth rid herself of the oppression of women inherent in our society in her implementation of the same dialectic, rather than having achieved a more insightful, profound sense of liberation. Regardless, she remains an engaging presence, the interplay of themes, her personal courage behind and before the lens attests in itself the necessity of challenge, and while I believe her work to yet fully mature on either aesthetic or formal fronts, the dichotomy wherein she has become her own echo, an experience mirrored in her abandon from the fashion industry, perhaps best relate the “inescapable” vice of pre¬conception in gender portrayal in this age.

Her earlier series, "Biest" and "Interview", reveal a more complex and engaging treatment of topical issues in portraiture and staged creations. The former, consistent and re-iterant, shows the artist in extreme close-up while clutching sparse scraps of paper between her teeth. Coy, random, the simplicity of the work holds charm, while easily acknowledgeable as the fruit of one "born" of the industry, the pop-iconography and classical imagery depicted upon each torn shred of paper is a light-hearted stab, preferable to the use of self in costume or exaggerative cosmetic stances as a reflexive paradigm of the media at large. "Interview" displays the artist in portrait, yet entirely bound in prints that say she loves me she loves me not the physical postures recall the boudoir photography of the turn of the century, and the newsprint mannequin is later seen bathed in amorphic fields of color, the "nude" descends in a perverse manner, eroticism and "voyeurism" are at a balance, extenuations of themes central to the discourse of photography since its first experiments: in this work the simultaneous evolution of the exploitation of the image, of societal machinations and the evolution of the art are of greater conceptual strength. Exquisite in rendering and seductive to the eye.

In survey of her auto-portraiture, from the seminal experiments to the more narrative series of stage creations, sensual and trivial aspects in the depiction and interaction with the artists conscious or subconscious states are manifest. The visual simulacra and employment of props and peripheral materials employed, identical to those found in the fashion industry, serve to render the imagery accessible to the mass-public, yet revealing a personal nauseam; disgust and rejection portrayed in relentless stereotypical stances fixed in time. Susanne has often established visual curtains comprised of Magazine covers and advertisements as the backdrop for her self-portraits, sensational in one regard, placative in another.

The audience is left to question the visual language employed: vehicle to further heighten an indictment of the milieu or a travesty which returns to an artist lacking experimentation, reiteration rather than innovation. Doubtless, the slogans, tape and bondage of herself in role of numerous preconceived “prototypes” of women refuse the pre-limitations of the artist, further illustrate our collective dependency on visual apparatus derived from the marketplace towards a depth interpretation of social themes, yet I find the series derivative. The creation of such a visual schemata divests the work of a more coherent representation of gender issues, accentuates deviance rather than a more resolute or penetrating examination of the themes at work in her studio.

“ Pornographia “ is a subjective and near lethal counterpoint in her work, while our society absorbs, celebrates and condemns its celebrity, what is at question? A denuded resignation or perverse accolade? It seems that Susanne Junkerman possesses the necessary experience, technical strengths and mastery of the studio in her staged creations, yet has yet to pierce the fabric rather than cast of interwoven segments in a highly subjective personal interpretation. While all visual histories have merit, it would appear that the strength of her artistry has yet to develop and perhaps in future we shall observe less bold play and extreme pageantry with the given themes & in their place, an artist able to truly surpass the conventions she has sought to challenge.

R. A. Suri