Images inside Images: The Interactions of Thomas Demand and Caruso St John

Abstract

Starting in the year 2000 the artist Thomas Demand and the architecture office of Adam Caruso and Peter St John developed a fruitful collaboration that saw the London based architects design a number of exhibitions for and with the artist in difficult and charged spaces. Arguably, this collaboration culminated in 2009 with Demand’s retrospective show at Mies van der Rohe’s Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin –itself a building generated as an experiment with exhibition architecture. In this project, with its fascinating display of giant curtains and floating images, each layer is an exercise in framing and representing both objects and space. Demand’s paper constructions, his photographs, the architects’ display architecture and the building that houses the exhibition, all nested within each other, speak to us of a repetitious approach to the act of framing. This fascinating sequence is captured in the stunning photographs that document the show, which cut across the different layers of a multidimensional conversation between authors and media. In its unique complexity of concentric voices and crossed echoes, this project offers us a fascinating record of an intense and unprecedented mode of influence in which architecture and photography reveal themselves as constructed by each other, accelerating their conversation and generating in the process a new and highly charged universe.