ANNETTE KELM
In her photographs, Annette Kelm (b. 1975) explores a variety of styles and genres—still life, object, architecture, and landscape photography—while deliberately flouting their conventions. As she experiments with the semantic charge various photographic forms of representation can give a subject, subtle ambivalences of meaning infiltrate the image, and the things shown seem both familiar and remote at the same time. Appropriation becomes commentary. This applies as well to Kelm’s engagement with the theme of Nazi book burnings in her current exhibition Die Bücher (The Books) at Museum Frieder Burda's Salon Berlin, where she presents a selection of books that were proscribed starting in 1933 as being “un-German.” Kelm pays tribute to these books as “survivors” that stood the test of time, acting as proxies for their authors and keeping them alive in collective memory.