Bombed-out bunkers to nuclear disasters: Thomas Demand on the state of the image

Photography isn’t Thomas Demand’s prescribed medium, rather it’s one of several mediums he implements as a means to larger ends, the ability to revisit and unpack especially charged moments that define our collective past and present. The German artist has forged a career out of reconstituting these either widely proliferated or passively ubiquitous images in paper and cardboard models that he then re-photographs. This extra step introduces the possibility of subjective distortion and a shifted perspective that forces the viewer to re-evaluate the implications of, say, Hilter’s bombed-out bunker (Room, 1995) or the jarringly unaffected control room at the Fukushima power plant following the 2011 nuclear disaster (Control Room, 2011).

Though Demand treats a wide range of subject matter – everything from lily pads floating on water (Pond, 2020) to a luthier’s atelier (Workshop, 2017) – the environments he recreates never contain their protagonists and yet aren’t lifeless, as the suggestion of their recent activation remains evident. This ghostly gaze is an invitation for the viewer to enter the fold and engage with the underlying issues or questions at hand. Operating as a sculptor, and even an architect in some respects, Demand ultimately considers himself a conceptual artist.

With his first comprehensive retrospective, entitled 'The Shutter of History' – which debuted in one form at UCCA Edge, Shanghai in 2022 (when we last interviewed the artist), was mounted at the Museum of Fine Art Houston in summer 2024, and is travelling to Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Art in January 2025 – Demand has been able to look back at over four decades of an ever-evolving yet distinctly codified practice. Staged with especially three-dimensional ‘Davina’ drapery furnished by Danish textile brand Kvadrat, the comprehensive exhibit comprises close to 100 works.

Between the latter two shows, Demand spoke to Wallpaper* about his trajectory so far, and his views on the state of today’s image culture.

In conversation with Thomas Demand

Wallpaper*: What is the significance of this first retrospective?

Thomas Demand: I’ve had many shows but they’ve always been tailor-made for a specific collection or topic, but none were curated to provide an overview of the years of practice I already have under my belt.

At the MFA Houston, ‘The Shutter of History' exhibition covered eight rooms, each with its own theme – in one case, the model as one of the main elements in my work and in another, the images that are inherently political. Another focused on the notion of experiencing the sublime (something entirely new). Yet another room was dedicated to my Dailies series, which was inspired by the immediacy of today’s social media. There was also a museum within a museum section that included the meta works I’ve made of artworks hung in these institutions. Visitors were able to follow my trajectory, but also walk backwards and uncover different qualities. For me, it was really a chance to look back at what I’d created over time.

W*: Tell us more about the meaning behind the show’s name, ‘The Shutter of History’.

TD: There’s one work I created ten years ago, of a bombed-out house in Gaza, which was shown at an exhibition in Israel as well. It was even more pressing when looking at all that was happening then and is happening now again. When considering this condition, I returned to one of the undercurrents of the show: our need to take pictures that represent past situations and allow us to locate ourselves within them as individuals. These pictures become iconic because they get repeated in different formats. One sees them again and again and they start to engender a specific collective reaction, behaviour, or practice when similar events occur.

W*: What’s one example of this?

TD: Today’s memorial culture. Because photography has such a short turnover time now, if something like a shooting in front of a Walmart happens, you see the immediate images of the emergency, the sheriff and the store, but the event itself unfolds slower. One initially sees an image of candles, flowers underneath a tree and that kind of takes over the whole perception of the event. We’ve come to expect to see certain standardised scenes in this respect.

A lot has changed since media moved online. One can read a New York Times headline from 40 years ago and it's very matter of fact. Today, everything is very emotional and subjective. There was no colouring then and now everything is painted. We tend to look at paintings of a reportage rather than the reportage itself. It's not documentary photography anymore.

Digital technology comes on top of that and makes certain kinds of images look much better than they actually are. If one looks at pictures of the Ukraine War, they appear to be unbelievably beautiful on a very basic level. One sees green uniforms, a muddy pit, a cannon, and a soldier lighting up a cigarette. All of the colours are so vivid that one feels what they are feeling. It used to be that this type of photography wasn’t about making you feel like you're in the dumps and was instead, intended to just communicate what was happening.

The constant barrage of photography we take in has changed our habits of reading this material and influenced what we find interesting. The idea of authenticity has been pushed aside. Everyone that might be a bystander of a crime is now also a photographer and that’s what we want to see immediately, not James Nachtwey capturing the fuming remains of 9/11 a week later. Mobile phone cameras have gotten so good that journalists now need to also take their own photographs when on the ground.

W*: What are your thoughts on the rapid emergence of AI-generated imagery these days?

TD: The technology is still quite clumsy, which is wonderful. It will eventually get refined and seamless, but right now you see images of King Charles with six fingers on one hand and that’s fantastic. The errors it makes are as interesting as the initial results.

There was a great piece in The New Yorker about game designers going out into the real world to capture surfaces because AI can’t create them the way nature does. Of course, one can buy the generated image of moss on a wet pine tree in Oregon at three o'clock in the morning, but you can also send somebody to the same place at six o'clock to capture the same image in the same context and generate it as a usable component. That's beautiful as an idea because one actually ends up looking at the world in a completely different way.

AI might bring an added value to that but it’s still stuck in its own echo chamber. The outlandish errors in an AI-generated image reveal complexities we might not expect to see but like photos of the memorials I mentioned before, the more these strange images – dinosaurs moving through a snow-covered Venice – are proliferated, the more they will seem normal. And yet, because of the way AI works, it will start to feed off of itself and will ultimately become so unrealistic that it will surpass our ability to interpret these visuals on an emotional level.

W*: How does this relate back to your image-making practice, where the extra layer of your subjective intervention was added; allowing the paper or cardboard to almost sterilise the original photograph?

TD: For me, it’s not about cleaning up the image, because cleaning would be taking the blood out after a murder case, but I do think my process makes the distance between reality and interpretation very clear; it's transparent that the image isn’t real, whereas with AI, it’s not very clear how real it is. My work is more like fictional writing than being matter of fact.

W*: How does an understanding of spatial design remain as key a consideration in your practice as it was early on in your career, with works like Room from 1995?

TD: It’s funny that you should cite that example as I was still a student and still very much addressing the immediate surroundings of Germany and our history. It's probably the buildings I grew up in that informed what I was exploring early on. I was, of course, dealing with how horrible the Third Reich [had been] but also exploring the glimmer of hope that was the resistance – multiple attempts on Hitler’s life. So I knew that if you looked at the image of his bombed-out bunker, you’d know what it signifies.

I acquired the rights for the image, unsurprisingly, from a British library but wasn’t really sure how to treat it right away. I began by projecting the image through a box and realised this didn’t get me anywhere. I then decided to reconstruct the depicted space itself as exactly as possible. That’s how I’ve worked ever since. This process allowed me to discover how important space is and what it can denote. I never published the version of Room that was a direct replication because that’s not what I wanted it to be about, there wasn’t anything unexpected, which is the element I appreciate the most from AI-generated imagery. When recreating the environments in these images, the dimensions are mostly estimations. One has to consider how the camera lens skews these measurements as well.

W*: How does the use of Kvadrat ‘Divina’ drapery provide you with an alternative way to display your work in these exhibitions?

TD: I’m not paid to say this but the material is really great to work with and I plan to use it again and again for different shows. Photography shows tend to be present in very dark spaces and I wanted to do something different. The fabric still allows the exhibitions to be enclosed and for the focus to be on work, but it breaks up the rhythm of these rectangular rooms after rooms after rooms after rooms with doors, after doors after doors. There’s something very inviting about turning museum galleries into environments that feel domestic and the textiles add that layer of depth and softness.

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