Historical Records
The exhibition divides very roughly into two sections. The first is Historical Records.
Thomas Demand is interested in moments and situations that have to do with the political, the representation of power, and irreversible actions that create new reference points in contemporary history. By choosing to represent and later reconstruct them, the artist seems to shift our relationship to the past, revealing the invisible mechanics behind the event’s presence in the public field, and retrospectively launching a reflexive process that spans questions from “what if” to “what actually happened?”
7.1 Control Room, 2011
This photograph features a reconstruction of the control room at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant, where a level-7 nuclear disaster took place in March 2011 (the same level on the International Nuclear and Radiological Event Scale was previously ascribed to the Chernobyl disaster). Yet, the only evidence of an emergency is offered by the fallen ceiling panels. Demand says that when we look at photographs from Fukushima, “we are looking not at a disaster but at an image of a disaster.” The original photo was taken on the phone of a Tokyo Electric Power Company employee, who travelled to the disaster zone. Within four days, the unedited image was impossible to find: in every photograph the control room looked as if nothing had happened, all the panels were in place, and nothing betrayed even the slightest interruption to the work of the plant.
7.2 Parliament, 2009
This work references the much-reproduced photo of the parliament building in Bonn, which was left empty when, after 30 years of gathering here, the parliament moved to the Reichstag Building in Berlin. Due to the camera angle, the presidium is left outside the frame. Now the minimal interiors, dark furniture, and brass rivets are the only witnesses to the distinguished history of West German democracy after World War II. The history of divided Germany is officially over, but whether unification and the transfer of the institutes of power to Berlin will be smooth and painless is another question.
7.3 Ballot, 2018
Voting booths, which are meant to ensure the independence and confidentiality of every voter’s political choice, look like a children’s construction set or a small-scale model of themselves. It is clear that they do not in fact offer much privacy. This is not the first time that Demand has explored basic democratic procedures (as in Poll, 2001), capturing that which has become obvious over the past 20 years: the individual voting booth is the last place where the election of the powers that be really takes place, and has become an empty signifier. The procedure itself has become a very fragile and abstract process.
7.4 Backyard, 2014
This very regular-looking backyard belongs to the house where Tamerlan Tsarnaev lived with his wife and child. In 2013, he and his brother Dzhokhar Tsarnaev planted self-made bombs at the Boston Marathon. After the terrorist attack, photographs of the two brothers’ lives circulated in the press, including the “original” image featured in this photo, where one could spot a woman coming out of the house. In the absence of humans, the spectacular blossoming cherry tree becomes the center of the composition. Appearing to be even more in focus and in contrast than the rest of the photograph, it almost automatically makes the image idyllic.
7.5 Gate, 2004
The photograph reproduces the image recorded by CCTV cameras early in the morning at the airport in Portland, Maine, during Mohamed Atta’s security check. On the same day, September 11, 2001, after changing in Boston for an American Airlines flight, Atta hijacked the plane and crashed it into the North Tower of the World Trade Center in New York City.