Thomas Demand’s solo exhibition The Stutter of History opened at Taipei Fine Arts Museum on January 18, 2025. The artist’s photographs lock in moments of political, social, or personal history using paper model recreations. Monumental works, like the Fukushima nuclear control room, are presented as chromogenic prints bonded to large acrylic sheets, which tower over the viewer. Smaller, more intimate works, from the artist’s Dailies series, invite the audience for a closer look at everyday tableaux, like a cup shoved into a chain-link fence.
On a few occasions, a series of work delimits its own physical space. Refuge (2021) illustrates the airport hotel room where American whistleblower Edward Snowden was first housed in Russia. The plywood walls of the installation at the museum confine visitors in close quarters with the photographs, heightening the claustrophobia.
A detail there caught my eye. Something not part of the work at all. A gargantuan concrete support column intruded into the space. Unmistakable, yet meant to be invisible. Multiple spotlights on the hard edge of the pillar created triangular stepped gradients of light and shadow. They resembled nothing less than folds of pliable gray paper.
This is my portrait of the artist Thomas Demand.