Judith Stenneken

Untitled (2014)

Statement:
WELCOME HOME
“It is almost banal to say so yet it needs to be stressed continually: all is creation, all is change, all is flux, all is metamorphosis.” This body of work deals with the seemingly simple fact that Henry Miller states so clearly in this quote. Everything is ongoing and never finished. Transition is a permanent condition. There is no beginning, middle and end. There is no sunset, nor is there a sunrise – instead we are the ones in motion.

I use metaphors of the journey, the voyager and transitory spaces (like hotel rooms, etc.) to describe in betweenness as a constant. The concepts of departure and arrival dissolve as the traveler keeps moving. The voyager’s home becomes the hotel room and the airplane. Spaces to pause but never to dwell.

We are in a phase in which change happens at an accelerating pace. It can leave one dizzy, disoriented and overwhelmed at times. We ‘burn-out’ as we try to keep up with this new pace and some of us turn to old beliefs in hope to reestablish a balance that seems lost.

I think the acceleration of change forces us out of our comfort zones, out of our habits and into adjustments. It forces us to
re-act. Coevally it offers a chance to embrace a core condition of life that we usually prefer to ignore: that all is uncertainty and control is an ideal.

Bio:
Judith Stenneken is an artist working in photography, video and installation. She grew up in a small village in the north of Germany with stints living in Hamburg, Berlin and London before moving to New York.

At twenty years old she pursued a career as an assistant producer, working for advertising agencies and TV commercial production companies in Hamburg until 2005 when she moved to Berlin to study photography.

Her first self-published book ‘Last Call | Zentralflughafen Tempelhof’ won the Grand Prize of Blurb’s Photography Book Now contest in 2010. The same body of work received the Young Talent Award of the F/Stop Photo Festival in Leipzig in 2009, as well as honorable mentions from the New York Photo Festival and Hey, Hot Shot! in 2010.

Stenneken was named one of PDN’s 30 – New and Emerging Photographers to Watch in 2011, the same year she moved to New York to pursue her Masters of Fine Arts. She received her MFA in Photography, Video and Related Media from the School of Visual Arts in 2013.

Her work has been featured in the exhibition ‘A Survey Of Documentary Styles In Early 21st Century Photobooks’ as well as in publications such as PDN, Photo International, Der Greif and most recently photograph magazine with an essay by Elisabeth Biondi.

A solo exhibition of her body of work ‘Welcome Home’ will be shown at Galerie f5,6 (Munich, Germany) in spring of 2016.

Artist’s Website: judithstenneken.de