bath in brilliant green by Nina Röder

Issue 119

With its melancholic visual language, Nina Röder’s series bath in brilliant green presents a poetic perspective on different forms of helplessness and loss. Nina started this series after she lost her father six years ago. Facing this situation in which her father has been terminally ill for years – a feeling of numbed helplessness surrounded her. In associative arrangements of portraits, landscapes and still life motifs – often created in darkness – she approaches in her project states of loss and rediscovery, as well as the metaphor of letting go.

Staged images of marble-like bodies, often in a performative correlation with the surrounding nature, question the meaning of human existence. Her figures are often related to forms of water – the origin of life though dually visualizing death within my morbid aesthetic. The physical interaction with the natural environment presents a performance and is inscribed in the photographs as an act of occupation.
Her works frequently depict natural structures and vegetal artifacts, such as bits of algae or thistles in an absurd form. Nina’s photographs show a space in between, wherefore narrations and actions are indicated, but are never completely legible. In their ambiguity they reveal a certain kind of poetry and mystery – a mood which can be found in German romanticism - in their longing for distance and escapism.

Röder’s images were created during Artist-in-Residences in Italy, Iceland, Ireland, Spain, and France over the past years. In its dramaturgy, the newly published book by Kehrer Heidelberg captures the different chromatic atmospheres of these countries.

Nina Röder lives and works in Berlin, Germany.  
To view more of Nina’s work, please visit her website.