Since 2006 Katja Stuke and Oliver Sieber have been traveling to Japan, working on topics from subculture to surveillance. Since 2011 they are developing an extensive body of work they call the »Japanese Lesson«. At the beginning it was a single one-channel video, dealing with the visual influence, research and overwealming impressions of the Japanese cities, life and culture. Since then their perspective became more elaborated and several new works have been created: photobooks, different photographic series, dealing with topics like protest and activism, activists and landscape — political landscape.
Katja Stuke and Oliver Sieber’s photographic work is image production in an understated mode. No photographs of decisive moments; not even any that search their surroundings for major events or specifically original motifs. Rather, it is casual photography: serene, attentive, more at a walking pace than that of lightning speed; a photography of process, oriented as much to time as to space. […] This photography has little to do with the Japanese iconography of tea ceremonies and rock gardens. It could also be said that it has little room left for it, as Stuke and Sieber‘s interest by no means focusses on the nostalgic or the exquisite image of Japan, but on the more prosaic spectacle of those vernacular landscapes that are equally urban and peripheral, medial and material. […] Stefanie Diekmann
The sequencing of these ‘Walks’ correspond to the natural process that is characteristic of the photographic work by Stuke and Sieber as a whole. After the picture is before the picture; one photo does not stand for itself, but is part of a sequence and constellation; what is captured in one photograph will look somewhat different in the next; and completing a series with a particular photo does not necessarily mean that it has been finalised. As a general rule, the work of these two photographers almost always shifts the photographic work beyond the moment and the motif towards a movement that is conceived as open and that only comes to a temporary standstill with the last image of the photographic ensemble. […] From a text by Stefanie Diekmann more about Japanese Lesson »»
The »Japanese Lesson« artist book consists of 13 chapters. Each chapter shows a ‚walk‘ either on a border of a district in Tokyo or Osaka which inhabitants experience discrimination and stigmatisation often due to the geographic history; or the walk could lead around or towards a (construction) site related to the Olympic Games Tokyo 2020. On each walk we take photographs every 100 or 200 meters in the the walking direction. In this way we create about 300 photographs during a 3 hour walk which later becomes a book, a video or a wall piece. Of each chapter of the artist book there also exist unique maquettes including 100 to 300 images.
Resulted from a long-lasting research the »Mashup« contains images and drawings from mangas and animes, still images from japanese movies, historical and current press-photographs; photos, drawings and paintings by japanese artists, some of their own works and material we found in the web, magazines, LP-record-sleeves, catalogues and in the streets.
Since 2005 Katja Stuke and Oliver Sieber have been traveling to Japan, working on topics from subculture to surveillance. Since 2011 their perspective became more elaborated and several new works have been created, dealing with topics like protest, activism or political landscape. A Future Book is a work from 2017. Created and exhibited before actually working on the Japanese Lesson it is dealing with questions of editing, sequencing and book-making itself.