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Date

16 May 2024

Gallery

Gallery Fotoatelier

Opening time

20:00

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.