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0116.1 Embassy re-edited ×

For the exhibition HOUSE OF CARD, a major retrospective of the work of Thomas Demand at M Leuven, Demand teamed up with Brandlhuber+ again. The installation for Embassy was adapted throughout the years for each new presentation after the original 0116 Embassy exhibition in Venice presented by Fondazione Prada in 2007. The installation was shown at Hamburger Kunsthalle in 2008, the Fundación Telefonica Madrid in 2008, the Museum für Moderne Kunst Frankfurt in 2012 before. The re-edited version is not only another adaption but at the same time a reflection of the collaboration between Brandlhuber+ and Thomas Demand over the years. Read more

For his photo series Embassy, Thomas Demand gained access to the Embassy of the Republic of Niger in Rome that was instrumental to US intervention in Iraq. The building is located in an unassuming ten-storey apartment building in a neighbourhood between the Vatican and the Olympic Stadium. Its nondescript appearance belies the monumental consequences of the robbery that took place there in January 2001, when several pieces of Embassy stationery and official stamps and seals were stolen from the building. It is widely believed that letters that turned up shortly after the break-in—appearing to document Saddam Hussein’s attempt to purchase yellowcake (an enriched form of uranium used in nuclear weapons) from Niger—were printed on these stolen papers. Though numerous intelligence officials and experts dismissed the documents as forgeries, President George W. Bush nevertheless cited them as a cause to go to war in2003.

Thomas Demand later reconstructed the site as a 1:1 paper sculpture together with Arno Brandlhuber to take the photographic proof of these spaces of remembrance. In the same collaborative form, Thomas Demand and Arno Brandlhuber developed the first exhibition of Embassy as a spatial installation at the Fondazione Giorgio Cini presented by Fondazione Prada in Venice in 2007. The translation back into a physical exhibition set-up was neither a mere 1:1 reconstruction—as the paper sculpture produced before—nor a conventional white cube form of an exhibition. To indicate the spatial configuration of the actual embassy space, the walls were placed so as to align the spectator’s eye with Demand’s camera angle during his working process. The backdrop creates a cinematographic moment, in which the two-dimensionality of the images come into tension with the three-dimensionality of the rooms of the embassy in Rome. Beyond, the exhibition architecture refers to the scale of the models, Read less

Category
Exhibition
Place
Leuven
Year
2020
Venue
M Leuven
Title
HOUSE OF CARD
Collaboration
Brandlhuber+ Team and Thomas Demand
Team
Kristof Croes, Angelika Hinterbrandner, Roberta Jurčić

© Brandlhuber+ Team

Overlay of floorplans © Brandlhuber+ Team

Thomas Demand. HOUSE OF CARD | Exhibition view M Leuven, 2020 © Dirk Pauwels

Thomas Demand. HOUSE OF CARD | Exhibition view M Leuven, 2020 © Dirk Pauwels

Thomas Demand. HOUSE OF CARD | Exhibition view M Leuven, 2020 © Dirk Pauwels

Thomas Demand. HOUSE OF CARD | Exhibition view M Leuven, 2020 © Dirk Pauwels