SOPHIE THUN, WET ROOMS, Musée Cantonal des Beaux-Arts Lausanne, Lausanne

 

SOPHIE THUN

WET ROOMS

MUSEE CANTONAL 

DES BEAUX-ARTS

LAUSANNE  

14.MARCH - 10.AUGUST  

Curator; Pierre-Henri Foulon

Reporter; Nazli Kok Akbas

 

'To reproduce oneself is to disappear and even the most basic asexualized being is rarefied by reproduction. Those who reproduce themselves do not die if, by death, we understand the passage from life to decomposition, but he who was, by reproducing himself, ceases to be what he was—because he doubles himself.'*1

    

Wet Rooms, refers to the darkroom in which the artist develops her photographs. She works exclusively with analogue photography, pushing the limits of its technical possibilities by creating 1:1 prints. An intimate space, marked by the presence of chemical baths essential to the unveiling of the image, it is also a space of solitude and silence in which the artist reconstructs her vision of the world.

When working on her large-format photos, she uses magnets to hold the paper aganist the metal wall in the dark-room. This surface frequently appears in her images.

In her photographs and life-size photograms printed on long paper banners, Sophie Thun uses her body as a tool to examine and question established concepts of society, sex and gender. The illusionary space of the image seems to merge with the real space of the wiever.

She plays with the concepts of scale and trompe l'oeil. Sophie Thun's large-scale photographic installations take the exhibition space itself as their starting point. Thun reveals the production and manipulation of images through a complex process of layering that challenges any fixed notion of time and space.

Sophie Thun began cutting up, dividing and repeating her own image for the series After Hours in 2019. At the time, she could only make her own art in the evenings in the rooms of the hotels where she was staying, after working as a technical assistant producing the images of well-known photographers.

She explained her fascination as a child in one of her interviews in 2021 with Daniel Sopeorri, saying,

"What fascinated me as a child was how blurred it is—whether a space belongs to an image or whether the image is part of the architecture. Building an illusion in the style of a trompe l’oeil. I am also interested in showing both the place where a photographic image is produced, i.e. the place where I take a picture, and the darkroom, i.e. the place where I later make a print. I almost always make use of the photogram technique, and, indeed, my work is usually a combination of a photograph and a photogram, where I am seen as the photographer and the exposer. After all, a photogram is created in the process of exposure. In other words, you have the time-lapse all in one image. Everything in the picture is happening at once. In photography, there are usually more processes: the shutter release moment and then the exposure or printing. I try to make these processes visible and to compress them into one image.

Sophie Thun was born in 1985 in Frankfurt, Germany. She grew up in Wrasaw, studied graphic design in Cracow and later painting and photography at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna. She currently lives and works in Vienna and Berlin.

She is interested in photography as a medium because of what it does to people. It is also a medium that interests her because it is increasingly replacing language these days, with many people preferring to send a picture rather than describe something in words.Sophie Thun mainly takes photos with her mobile phone when she is working on a collage, she takes two photos because she needs two negatives.

Sophie Thun's work is an autobiographical stream of images, a visual collection of places and moments in which the artist has worked, photographed and exhibited. At each step of the creative process, her body is directly on the photographic paper.

*1 George Bataille, Littérature and Evil (Penguin, 2012), page 69.

 

Nazli Kok Art Reports, Lausanne.