Thomas Demand, the artist who, with his photos of places of memory reconstructed from paper, makes the view of extraterrestrials on human heritage imaginable, has friends in the stratosphere of culture. In the retrospective of his works, which Demand is now opening in the Moscow Garage, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Gorky Park, he also integrates his creative dialogue with Alexander Kluge, who is represented in three multi-channel film collages on the subject of Russia and the planet earth in spaceship pavilions hanging from the ceiling. The history mystifier Kluge contributed a glowing video greeting from Munich to the vernissage, in which he calls for the algorithms of Silicon Valley to be countered with algorithms of art, and praises the garage as one of the few lighthouseswhich spread their signal across the globe.
Kerstin Holm
Editor in the features section.
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Thanks to the strong signal from the garage, Demand's latest work also came about, the true-to-scale replica and the photographic staging of that hermetically sealed hotel room in the transit area of Moscow's Sheremetyevo Airport, where the American ex-secret service agent Edward Snowden, who fled from Hong Kong, spent five weeks in 2013 before he did so received asylum in Russia. He has been trying to get information about those rooms for years, says Demand, but journalistic researchers could not have helped him. It was not until the garage - especially the work of its co-founder Roman Abramowitsch, according to a curator - that a photographer recently opened access to the hostel, which was just completed in 2013,in which Snowden was the only resident in a windowless room - corresponding to the intermediate zone - for more than a month.
The five-part series of images with the title “Asyl” (Refuge) relocates with the paper replica of that crypt, which resembles a cocoon of surveillance technology, where Snowden had publicized the surveillance methods of the services employing him and therefore fled a trial for high treason with a possible death sentence completed previous life. The partly finely grained, partly silvery smooth, deceptively naturalistically illuminated surfaces therefore also look like the monumental equivalent of those goods printed on paper that are given to the deceased in China. The pillow made of snow-white tissue paper, which is lined with shredder cellulose and shimmers transparently under the yellowish lamp pane, is a reminder of this. As always with Demand, the sockets, smoke alarms, telephone receivers,but also the short, narrow hotel corridor tapering towards a wall convey the feeling of complete loss of communication. The real Snowden, with whom Demand wants to be in loose contact, is now of course a family man. He has declared that he wants to take on Russian citizenship and, as art lovers assure, is seen occasionally in the Tretyakov Gallery.