Sophie Thun. Wet Rooms

Playing with the concepts of scale and trompe l’œil, the vast photo installations created by Sophie Thun take the exhibition space as their starting point. The artist renders modes of production visible through a complex process of layering that questions any fixed notion of time and space.

Wet Rooms refers to the darkroom where Thun develops her analog photographs. An intimate space marked by the presence of chemical baths essential to revealing the image, it is also a space of solitude and silence in which the artist reconstructs her vision of the world, notably through the motif of the window. In an elaborate collage that mixes photograms and large-format prints, she overlays her own image onto the places where she has lived, worked, and exhibited, creating an archive that is continuously evolving.

By exploring the question of self-representation, Thun becomes both the creator of the image and the subject on display, the author and the object. In doing so, she disrupts the power dynamics inherent in the strategies of representation that have long shaped the history of the female nude and the codes of pornography. However, this assertion is also paired with a form of disappearance. Her body, fragmented, multiplied, and rearranged, exists everywhere and nowhere simultaneously. Thus, the exhibition becomes a space where fragments of a multifaceted and elusive identity coexist, providing the foundation for an autofictional narrative.

Sophie Thun was born in 1985 in Frankfurt am Main. She lives and works in Vienna. Wet Rooms is her first solo show in Switzerland.

Curator of the exhibition: Pierre-Henri Foulon, curator of contemporary art, MCBA