Batia Suter’s work has several substantial iterations at its heart. It stems from an understanding of volume and how images function, both in terms of their materiality and their historical context. This is most evident in her opuses Parallel Encyclopedia I and II, both published by Roma. The work that Suter makes can be divided into different pursuits of repurposing images. First, there is the stronghold of new categorization that arises from excavating the work and placing it into new, illuminated contexts, depending on how the images are to be read in relation to their totality. It is a continuum, a way in which meaning is both bred and deconstructed equally by the sum of its aggregate exposition.
Second to this, there is a tendency to rework images or appeal to their material nature when she consults the process of their inherent physicality. Sometimes this results in a doubling of images to create a new third image; in the case of her latest book, La Nonpareille, it is achieved through the conceit of how she doubles these images, as well as how she has decided to display their materiality. The work consists of an archive of glass slides depicting machines of labor from the early 20th century. This subject matter has been explored previously by Thomas Ruff, whose Maschinen depicts industrial machines as still lives with a patina of polychromatic color, highlighting their presence in the environment of 1930s workrooms, where they are situated. From the future, the artist emphasizes their objectivity through an unintentional pop sensibility, with typology at their base. With Suter, the archive is drawn from a similar trove of industrial photography from the TU DELFT archive, which was previously used for teaching mechanical technology. In Suter’s hands, the pictures/glass objects become a compendium of ecyclopedic form, culled from their dusty shelf existence into a new conversation that suggests a review of labor, but also of image.
In the book, the glass lantern slides are reproduced face down, meaning the glass in which they are mounted divides the viewer from the surface of the image, creating a slight distortion to the image itself through 5mm of glass interface. This is intentional and creates a schism about how we observe the canonical image/archival source, from its inherent physicality, which divides us from it. In the age of AI, with challenging questions regarding labor floating in the ether, this suggests a distortion of ho we might understand archival knowledge of the past, but might also question the future optics of labor in a world where the image of such pursuits dissolve or distort and stretch in front of our eyes, asking us, as an audience to re-appreaise how we understand such matters. Although this is not explicitly mentioned in her work, it is understood as a parallel observation.
She has employed this same methodology in her other books, asking more from the viewer than what she might otherwise declare as an absolute. It is for this reason that her practice resonates with me. What I find even more compelling is considering how an audience, without context, might understand her books in 100 years. Will they know the shift between the base photographic material, the time it was created, and the artist who has intervened to ask questions of her present, her future, and her past? Many more questions about her practice are hidden beneath the surface of its accumulation. In this, her work presents itself as even in subject matter and archival impulse, but uneven, making it difficult to be understood simply as one thing.
I have been following Suter’s work more closely over the past year or so. Although I had seen it previously and understood her work through the lens of Aby Warburg, I feel that I have done a slight disservice by not delving deeper. I sense within myself a slight fatigue with the invocation of Warburg by many of our contemporaries, and in so doing, shamefully, have not been as acute in my assessment of works like Suter’s, which bear further nuance. Although I understand Warburg’s work and its importance, it is essential to comprehend Suter’s work as being much deeper than a simple footnote to the work being crafted by the invocation of Warburg and his Bilderatlas. There are more and more subtle attentions to subject matter and materialism in Suter’s books and exhibitions, and the work bears more scrutiny than surface reading. She will have to forgive my late understanding. Specific work needs to be activated through viewer exchange and experience. We were not always ready for everything all at once, all of the time, despite the world asking us to be. I continue to be fascinated by Suter’s practice, and her books, elegantly designed by Roma, are highly recommended.
Batia Suter
La Nonpareille
Roma Publications