Sunday, 18.10. | 5 pm
music, tea and video screening

What do we see when we enter a museum? Michael Rieken’s newly published book musea invites us to revisit this question.

In musea, Rieken lets his camera wander: over works of art, through spaces—and, at the same time, over everything that catches his eye. The photographs move beyond the prescribed viewpoint and instead capture moments of perception: When a shadow suddenly becomes more important than a painting, a reflection becomes one’s own visual world, or a single detail transforms the entire space. The book is not a documentary; only the index at the end reveals where the images were taken.
Proximity and distance, sharpness and blur, emptiness and density take on a rhythm of their own. The book’s soundtrack expands this rhythm to an acoustic dimension—musea can almost be read like a musical score.

On October 18 at 5 pm, Michael Rieken will present the book in the KH Bremen project space. The book release will be accompanied by a video screening, music, and tea.

Michael Rieken has been working as a visual artist and musician in Bremen since 1977. His cross-media practice encompasses photography, video, drawing, installation, and sound. In his works, he combines visual and acoustic elements and explores perception, space, and the interactions between different media. Since 2001 he teaches Interactive Installation at the University of the Arts Bremen. His works were most recently on view in 2023 in the exhibitions In Archive eintauchen at the DA-Kunsthaus Kloster Gravenhorst and Schloss Senden, as well as in Urban Samples and a Table Where Tea Is Served at RaumPro Bremen. As a musician and DJ, he performs under the alias Paul Michael von Ganski. He has been a member of KH Bremen since 2019.

Michael Rieken - musea was published by KrautIn Verlag Berlin and was supported by the Bremen Senator for Culture and the Karin and Uwe Hollweg Foundation.

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