Thomas Demand: The Stutter of History

German artist Thomas Demand is renowned for his conceptual photography, which utilizes realistic paper models. His exploration of media characteristics and the nuanced layers of his interpretive approach to issues profoundly reflect his unique philosophical thinking in the process of visual communication. Demand skillfully combines the spatial elements of sculpture and architecture with the narrative essence of flat photography, challenging our ingrained associations between photography and reality through the interplay of history and memory, fiction and reality.

"Thomas Demand: The Stammering of History" is the largest retrospective exhibition of the artist's work in 30 years. The exhibition traces Demand's creative journey and thought processes, from his early experimental works to his magnificent large-scale series, re-examining how he disrupts our habitual interpretations of images. Demand reconstructs scenes of historical events using paper models made of cardboard and colored paper, and records them with a camera lens. Finally, the models are destroyed, leaving behind only a single photographic image. This method, which blurs the creative process and the final form, proposes a personalized way of viewing history and an artistic language for reconstructing memory.

This exhibition is jointly curated by the Foundation for the Exhibition of Photography, Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, and the Taipei Fine Arts Museum. Originally planned to open at the Taipei Fine Arts Museum in the autumn of 2022, the exhibition was postponed until 2025 due to the severe impact of the pandemic on previous exhibition venues. Despite various setbacks, the ultimate realization of this exhibition is truly gratifying. It is worth noting that Demand himself was an invited artist at the Taipei Biennial in 2002. This exhibition wholeheartedly welcomes the artist's return to Taipei, offering audiences a close-up look at his intriguing artistic intentions and an appreciation of the layered transitions and intrinsic depth of his artistic language.

The exhibition is structured around four thematic axes: "Uncanny History," "Architectural Impulse," "Daily Mystery," and "Moving Images." Curator Douglas Fogle attempts to explore the faltering narrative of historical memory and amnesia in Demand's work. The exhibition catalog also includes an essay of the same name, "The Stammering of History," as well as critiques by contemporary art historian and theorist Margaret Iversen, an essay by Scottish writer Ali Smith, and French writer Maylis de Kerangal's reflections on her first encounter with Demand's work. These texts provide a brilliant and in-depth exploration of collective history and individual memory, reality and fiction in Demand's photographic images.

We sincerely thank the artist for his unreserved support and assistance with this exhibition, and express our heartfelt gratitude to the professional and dedicated team of the museum. This exhibition allows the audience to fully appreciate how Demand handles the principles of interpreting photographic reality and memory reality, and two-dimensional and three-dimensional forms, and to deeply consider the inquiry into image culture and the meaning of virtuality and reality in contemporary society, while also showcasing a unique creative perspective that responds to the Anthropocene through contemporary photography.