Gregor Sailer
The Polar Silk Road 2017–2022
Curated by Teona Gogichaishvili
In recent years, Gregor Sailer has
focused on the area around the North Pole. Here, too, it is the extreme
excesses of human activity that prompted Sailer to travel to the far north on
several occasions to photograph what remains largely hidden.
Five countries border the Arctic
Ocean: Denmark (through Greenland), Canada, Norway, Russia, and the United
States. Finland, Iceland and Sweden also have territorial areas. The region is
populated by indigenous peoples, albeit very sparsely due to the severely
adverse living conditions. Three maritime routes allow a crossing of the Arctic
Ocean, depending on the season and the extent of the ice cover. But the melting
of the sea ice is set to create a shorter trade route in the future, the
so-called Polar Silk Road, providing access to new raw material deposits
(natural gas and oil). Countries inside and outside the Arctic are already
asserting their claims.
During a long preparatory phase Gregor
Sailer not only researched those locations that were particularly exciting
thematically, geographically and visually, but he also took on the laborious
and often tedious task of obtaining the necessary access authorisations. Armed
with the requisite permits and at least 25 kg of photographic equipment, Gregor
Sailer repeatedly set out on photographic expeditions of several days to
military bases, research facilities, ports, and oil and gas production sites.
In Sailer’s photographs, utopia and dystopia are never far apart. For all their
sobriety, these calm and concentrated photographs are nonetheless highly
charged with content, yet many of these places seem like launching ramps to
nowhere.
There are close ties between Arctic exploration and the early days of photography. When explorers set out to reconnoitre this unknown region of the world during the second half of the 19th century, photographers were always part of the expedition. Gregor Sailer is therefore following a long photographic tradition. Here, too, he uses a large-format analogue camera that is not reliant on cold-sensitive batteries. With The Polar Silk Road, Sailer has pulled off a major photographic achievement which, accompanied by essays by experts from various fields, gives us a deep insight into this region, one that is extremely important both economically and militarily as well as scientifically.
Gregor Sailer
(born 1980) is a photographer working in the fields of art and architecture.
His work explores how buildings and structures can represent economic,
political and social ideas, and he often creates images in remote or hard to
access locations.
From 2002 to
2007 he studied Communication Design at the Dortmund University of Applied
Sciences and Arts, specialising in photography and experimental film. He also
completed a Master’s degree in Photographic Studies there in 2015.
Sailer’s works
have won multiple awards and have been shown nationally and internationally in
solo and group exhibitions, including in New York, London, Arles, Milan,
Vienna, Prague, Berlin and Budapest. Many of his photo series have been
published as photo books, most recently The Polar Silk Road, The Box and Unseen Places. He lives and
works in Tyrol, Austria.