HISTORY IN PHOTOGRAPHY, A COPY OF A COPY: THOMAS DEMAND AT PROA

Through November, together with the Foundation for the Exhibition of Photography (FEP), Proa presents Thomas Demand: El tartamudeo de la historia (The Stutter of History), the first retrospective in Argentina devoted to the renowned German artist. Curated by Douglas Fogle, the exhibition brings together more than sixty works—large-format photographs, videos, and wallpapers—spanning three decades of a practice situated between sculpture, photography, and conceptual art.

Demand's arrival in Buenos Aires is one of the most significant events of the cultural season. Following presentations at institutions such as the Jeu de Paume in Paris and the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, the exhibition lands at Proa with a layout that offers an in-depth look at a body of work as singular as it is timely.

The artist works with a highly personal method: starting from photographs published in newspapers, magazines, archives, and on the internet, depicting emblematic episodes in history, he reconstructs those spaces at full scale using only paper and cardboard. The Fukushima control room after the 2011 tsunami, Edward Snowden's refuge in Moscow, the Stasi office in East Berlin, Bill Gates's college dorm room, and the hotel room where Whitney Houston had her last dinner, among others, are part of an unsettling repertoire. Never showing the people involved, these empty architectures preserve the traces of events that remain etched in collective memory. Once the models are built, Demand photographs them following the original shots and then destroys them. The final image is the sole vestige of a process that can take the artist months of painstaking handcraft.

"I make cardboard sculptures, I photograph them, and then I no longer need them. They reflect something you may have seen before. They're based on images we know from the news, from film, or from history. What you see is a copy of a copy, something familiar but never entirely reliable," the artist explained during his first visit to Buenos Aires. "We all know the Oval Office or Saddam Hussein's hideout even though we've never been there. We share those images globally. Collective memory is like a marvelous block of marble from which I can make my sculptures."

In a historical moment marked by the incessant circulation of images and the rise of artificial intelligence, Demand's work takes on a key dimension for reflecting on what we see, how we process what we see, and the veracity of the images that shape our collective imagination. "My photography takes months. That slowness gives it depth and review. The screen always lies; making something with your hands produces a different experience of reality," says Demand.

Thomas Demand: El tartamudeo de la historia will be on view through November at Proa, Av. Pedro de Mendoza 1929, La Boca, Buenos Aires, Argentina.