The city of Munich is one of the main locations of Cyprien Gaillard’s latest film Retinal Rivalry, a landmark work that takes us on a journey of folded time and unreachable urban surfaces. This work expands Gaillard’s stereoscopic motion pictures with a further exploration in their sculptural and psychedelic space, and subverts our perception of image and its convention. Starting this year off with reflection on public monuments and their concepts and meanings, we borrow views from Gaillard’s long search for artefacts and architecture that have lost their original purposes. From there we ask how the building of Haus der Kunst serves as a monument to its troubled history and revitalise ourselves with new works by living artists. The exhibition presents this groundbreaking film installation that is based on an intense photographic scouting research, with a new series of site-specific works.
The Berlin- and Paris-based artist Cyprien Gaillard works across a range of media, including photography, film, video, collage, installation, and live performance. His extraordinary cosmos gives new form to such phenomena as civilisational upheaval and geological time. Concerned with the wreckage of modernity and the intersections between human artefacts, urban geography, and psychology, Gaillard’s work embraces a poetry of entropy that rearranges history to shed new light on the present.
The film Retinal Rivalry is co-commissioned by Haus der Kunst and premiered at Fondation Beyeler in the summer of 2024. By expanding the pictorial space and embracing the medium’s spatiality as an organisational principle for the various subjects considered, the film leaves specific narration behind to focus on pure vision.
Curated by Andrea Lissoni and Xue Tan with Laila Wu.