BUENOS AIRES.- Together with the Foundation for the Exhibition of Photography (FEP), Proa presents “Thomas Demand: The Stutter of History,” the first retrospective in Argentina dedicated to the renowned German artist. Curated by Douglas Fogle, the exhibition brings together more than sixty works—large-format photographs, videos, and wallpapers—spanning three decades of a practice situated between sculpture, photography, and conceptual art.
Demand’s arrival in Buenos Aires constitutes one of the most significant events of the cultural season. Following its presentation at institutions such as the Jeu de Paume in Paris and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the exhibition arrives in Proa’s galleries with a survey that offers an in-depth approach to a body of work as unique as it is timely.
The artist works with a highly personal method: he begins with photographs published in newspapers, magazines, archives, and on the Internet depicting emblematic episodes in history, and reconstructs those spaces at full scale using only paper and cardboard. The control room at Fukushima after the 2011 tsunami, Edward Snowden’s refuge in Moscow, the Stasi office in East Berlin, Bill Gates’s college dorm room, and the hotel room where Whitney Houston ate her last dinner, among others, form part of an unsettling repertoire. Without ever showing the people involved, these empty architectures preserve the traces of events that remain engraved in collective memory. Once the models are completed, Demand photographs them according to the original shots and then destroys them. The final image is the only vestige of a process that can take the artist months of painstaking manual work.
“I make cardboard sculptures, photograph them, and then I no longer need them. They reflect something you may have seen before. They are based on images we know from the news, cinema, or history. What you see is a copy of a copy, something familiar but never entirely reliable,” the artist explained during his first visit to Buenos Aires. “We all know the Oval Office or Saddam Hussein’s hiding place even though we have never been there. We share those images globally. Collective memory is like a wonderful block of marble from which I can make my sculptures.”
In the context of a historical moment marked by the relentless circulation of images and the advance of artificial intelligence, Demand’s work acquires a key dimension for reflecting on what we see, how we process what we see, and the veracity of those images that shape our imagination. “My photography takes months. That slowness gives it depth and allows for revision. The screen always lies; making something with your hands produces a different experience of reality,” Demand states.
About the exhibition
Through thematic sections that account for the different interests and periods of his extensive production, the selection of works places the visitor before scenes that are strange yet familiar, in which the precision of photography coexists with the fragility of paper, calling into question the idea of the document and the apparent objectivity of the image. Inevitably, each of the images created by Demand prompts the viewer to doubt: what do we really remember about historical events? How much of that memory is shaped by experience and how much by the images we consume through the media?
Unsettling histories
The main focus of this exhibition is the large-scale photographic works that form the core of the artist’s production. The selection includes examples from the early stages of his career through the present day, encompassing a series of significant political and artistic moments in visual history: from works derived from seemingly banal images to important yet visually unidentifiable episodes in the history of art and politics, such as the control room of the Fukushima nuclear power plant before the partial meltdown of its reactor (Control Room, 2011) or the boarding stairs leading to an airplane (Gangway, 2001). Whether reconstructing an image of an East German television studio (Studio, 1997), a generic-looking photocopy shop (Copyshop, 1999), or the acoustically tiled room of a recording studio (Labor, 2000), Demand often foregrounds the act of recording, reproducing, and disseminating images and content in his work.
The mysteries of everyday life
The exhibition also presents Demand’s ongoing series, the Dailies, which has been a revelation in terms of its source material, medium, and scale. Domestic in size and printed using a dye transfer process, they follow the tradition of conventional photographic works, although they undergo the same creative process of transformation from image to paper sculpture and back to image. The other significant difference within Demand’s production lies in their source images. They are based on photographs of the world around him taken with his iPhone and range from images of clothespins attached to an outdoor clothesline against a blue sky, an empty frozen yogurt container left on a shelf, a bar of soap balancing on the edge of a sink, and coffee cups suspended in the holes of a wire fence. The Dailies encapsulate Demand’s personal vision of history, which is constituted as much by the minor and random images we encounter in everyday life as by world events. Their delicacy and intimacy creatively contrast with the monumental scale and more profound themes. Within Demand’s production, the Dailies constitute a kind of silent autobiography of his visual everyday life.
The architectural impulse
Demand studied with the sculptor Fritz Schwegler at the Kunstakademie D黶seldorf, who encouraged him to investigate the possibilities of architectural models. In his explorations of the visual world, Demand began to employ wallpaper to give his photographic and sculptural practice a spatial and architectural dimension. A recent exhibition at Matthew Marks Gallery in New York employed a series of wallpapers installed from floor to ceiling featuring one of Demand’s recreated images of school lockers, over which he hung a group of photographs from the Dailies series. This exhibition includes a series of his earlier projects that unfold as architectural interventions upon which he hangs his photographic works. In addition, his Model Studies series (2011), direct photographs of elements abstracted from models by well-known architects and designers, adds an additional layer of interpretation to the presentation that “The Stutter of History” offers of both the content and form of his practice and his underlying view of the built environment.
Moving images
Cinematic animations have been an important part of Demand’s practice since his recreation of the tunnel in which Princess Diana died in the work Tunnel (1999). More recently, he created a stop-motion animation work with his film Pacific Sun (2012), in which the artist meticulously recreated a YouTube video of the interior of a cruise ship experiencing extreme turbulence. Returning to the recording of spectacular moments of everyday life that now circulate endlessly on the Internet, this work brings together all the themes that interest Demand and will be a central piece of the exhibition at Proa. By bringing together more than 60 works from these four main areas of his production, “Thomas Demand: The Stutter of History” offers an overview of the artist’s way of seeing the world and a lesson in how to approach the avalanche of historical events we consume through the world of images.
Proa and its commitment to photography
This collaboration with FEP holds particular significance for Proa, as it consolidates an ongoing line of work centered on photography and on presenting large-scale international exhibitions in Buenos Aires. Throughout its history, Proa has developed projects dedicated to central figures in photography and contemporary image-making, forging partnerships with institutions, collections, artists, and curators from different countries.
Over the course of three decades, the institution has dedicated exhibitions to fundamental artists such as Sebasti鉶 Salgado, Edward Burtynsky, Grete Stern, Horacio Coppola, and Facundo de Zuvir韆, as well as research projects such as “Photography in Argentina 1850–2010: Contradiction and Continuity,” organized together with The J. Paul Getty Museum, and the presentation of the prestigious Prix Pictet. It has also introduced Argentine audiences to the work of leading figures of the D黶seldorf School such as Andreas Gursky, Candida H鰂er, Axel H黷te, Thomas Ruff, and Thomas Struth.
