Fotografi

In 1990 Félix González-Torres encountered an artwork by Roni Horn called Gold Field (1980/82), a simple sheet of gold foil placed on the floor of the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art. González-Torres was deeply moved and wrote to Horn, beginning an exchange between the artists that would last until González-Torres' passing in 1996. Félix González-Torres Roni Horn was created as a photographic essay with the intention of sharing the experiential qualities of the artists' work and the profound relationships underlying it. It explores four iconic works (among others)-"Untitled" (For Stockholm) (1992) and "Untitled" (Blood) (1992) by González-Torres, and Well and Truly (2009-10) and a.k.a. (2008-09) by Horn-and emphasizes notions of doubling, duality, repetition, and identity. Images of these pieces, taken on the occasion of a 2022 exhibition at the Bourse de Commerce-Pinault Collection in Paris, reveal both artists' radical visual vocabularies, as well their shared passion for language, writing and poetry. Their intention emerges as two-fold: to create a tension between artist, viewer and object; and to grasp the inexpressible, the immeasurable.

Building on his interest in evolution, philosophy and society, in his project A Gift From Him Maximilian Prüfer (*1986) explores the destruction of natural habitats to make way for agriculture in China. To this end, Prüfer took two trips to the Szechuan Province, where the fruit trees need to be pollinated by hand due to insect deaths caused by the increased use of pesticides. These developments are attributable to Mao's campaign to "Destroy the Four Olds", which entailed the killing of around two billion sparrows in order to restore the natural equilibrium. Prüfer documented the entire manual pollination process in photos, collected items and films which make for an ambivalent exploration of the cultural evolution of humankind.

Inwelt von Maximilian Prüfer (*1986) ist die Fortsetzung der 2016 herausgegebenen Publikation Brut und umfasst die seitdem entstandenen Werkserien des Künstlers. Prüfer arbeitet an verschiedenen selbstentwickelten Verfahren, welche die Spuren von Insekten und Naturphänomenen sichtbar machen. Hierbei analysiert der Künstler das Verhalten von Tieren, um es anschließend mit menschlichem Verhalten zu vergleichen. In seiner 2020 begonnenen Werkserie Forming Thoughts etwa, untersucht er die Wege und Straßen von Ameisen. Er versucht hierbei, einen direkten Bezug zu neurologischen Strukturen herzustellen und Rückschlüsse über das Verhalten kollektiver Lebewesen sowie das Naturverständnis des Menschen zu ziehen.

In 2013, five years after the world has been convulsed by a global banking and financial crisis, Isaac Julien premiered his film PLAYTIME to address an important question: Can capital be rendered visible? By following the stories of six protagonists-interconnecting figures in the world of art and finance-Isaac Julien subsequently found narrative images for the process of capital interlocking at a global level, intertwining a macroscopic and a microscopic perspective dialectically, as it were.The Palais Populaire and the Wemhöner Collection have joined forces to shed new light on PLAYTIME from today's perspective and to testify to the work's topicality, as capital as a medium plays into almost all political, social and societal issues and influences the lives of nearly every human being on this planet.