JERUSALEM.- Marking the artist’s first retrospective in Israel, a major touring career survey dedicated to the renowned artist Thomas Demand has opened at the Israel Museum this past August 8th, 2023. Thomas Demand: The Stutter of History brings together 70 works that trace Demand’s practice over two and half decades of investigating the persistence of images and their ability to embed themselves in a society’s collective memory. The exhibition, which is the largest presentation during its international tour, takes a thematic approach to examining the arc of Demand’s career, highlighting his intensive craft and exploration of the emotional and aesthetic to his engagement with the social and political. One of the highlights of the exhibition was the unveiling of a new work commissioned by the Israel Museum, for which Demand addresses current affairs in the country.

Demand’s process begins with identifying a source image, often widely circulated photographs from major news stories. He then meticulously reconstructs the image in three dimensions at a one-to-one scale using paper and cardboard. This re-created environment, absent of any humans but showing traces of recent activity, is photographed and the model subsequently destroyed in a further complication between the original and the reproduction, and between reality and artificiality.

“We are living through a time where we are constantly inundated with images, whether on the news, social media, or in our attempts to document daily life on our cellular devices,” said Nirith Nelson, Landeau Family Senior Curator of Contemporary Art at the Israel Museum, Jerusalem. “Thomas’ work is a pressing confrontation of photography as a medium, revealing it as a transmutation of lived experiences at a time when society is consuming visual content on an unprecedented scale.”

“It’s an honor to provide an in-depth platform for exploring the practice of Thomas Demand, an artist whose work defies genres in his mixing of “scale models” and photography to provoke deeper thinking about how an image is constructed and interpreted,” said Denis Weil, the Anne and Jerome Fisher Director of the Israel Museum, Jerusalem. “By commissioning a new work specific to the complex region where we are based, we hope to catalyze new conversations locally as well as abroad on how visual information shapes perceptions and what it leaves out.”




The works on view touch on each chapter of Demand’s career, spanning stop-motion film and large-scale photographic works to works in the form of wallpaper. One of the key moments at the exhibition is Backyard (2014), which depicts the courtyard of the building in which the Boston Marathon bomber Tamerlan Tsarnaev's lived with his wife and child. Images that dominated news coverage at the time depicted Tsarnaev's wife leaving the back door, but in Demand’s reconstruction, she is removed and the cherry blossoms in the background become an essential part of the image. In this way, Demand highlights the continuous cycle of nature as undisturbed by human factors, encouraging viewers to encounter aspects from this event that went unobserved in news reporting. Extending Demand’s contemplation of the cherry blossom, visitors to the exhibition are immersed in a room featuring Hanami (2014) a wallpaper created by Demand that depicts the delicate blooms at their peak and whose title refers to the Japanese custom of reflecting on life’s fleeting nature by celebrating the blooms’ brief emergence. Hanami is in fact an enlargement of the cherry blossoms featured in Backyard (2014).

Works later in the exhibition showcase Demand’s progression in engaging with complicated historical events of the distant and recent past. In Archive (1995), Demand recreates the film archive of Nazi propagandist and filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl, whose orderly stacks of boxes belies the dark reality of what they contain. Demand’s analysis of mass media consumption is further explored in Ruin (2017), in which he recreates the wreckage of a Gaza home following a missile strike, omitting the children playing as depicted in the original. His resulting photograph evokes a stock image of any number of disasters around the world, pointing to the news media’s role in perpetuating the global consumption of interchangeable markers of human suffering. The Stutter of History also includes Demand’s work exploring American politics, including Poll (2001), created in response to the Florida recount of ballots in the 2000 U. S. Presidential election; and Folders (2017), which recreates President-elect Trump’s first press conference, in which he offered piles of manila folders as evidence of divesting himself from his corporation before assuming office.

Also featured are works drawn from the Israel Museum’s collection, including Pacific Sun (2012), depicting a chaotic scene inside the lounge of an ocean liner as it goes through rough waters. A painstaking recreation of a YouTube clip seen by the artist, Pacific Sun is Demand’s most elaborate and ambitious film project, comprising a total of 2,400 still images. In his staging of the video, Demand meticulously recreated scenes of sliding and colliding furniture out of construction paper. Working alongside 10 animation artists in Hollywood, Demand spent months re-enacting the exact choreography of the event and photographing every movement.

Another IMJ holding, Copyshop (1999) references his own artistic practice and approach to the photographic image. The photocopy machines and piles of paper made of paper embody, in a way that is simultaneously concrete and symbolic, the loss of the original. Demand’s self-referential approach can also be seen in more recent work. In Pond (2020), the artist references Claude Monet’s iconic masterpiece in recreating a scene of delicate blooms that speaks to both artificiality and the natural. Created after going to Japan and seeing a pond that imitates the original work of art, Demand’s photograph serves as a copy of the copy.

Thomas Demand (b. 1964) lives and works in Berlin and Los Angeles. He has had solo exhibitions at museums including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Tokyo, M Leuven in Belgium, the Garage Museum of Contemporary Art in Moscow, and Fundacíon Botín in Santander, Spain. In 2004 he represented Germany at the São Paulo Biennial.

Israel Museum
Thomas Demand: The Stutter of History
August 9th, 2023 - February 10th, 2024