Sophie Thun. Wet Rooms

Sophie Thun’s work looks like an accumulation of images of the venues where the artist has worked and exhibited. Her spatial installations play with our perception of reality while depicting identity as a process that is constantly changing.

Sophie Thun mainly works with analog photography. She is always looking to push the medium’s technical possibilities further, not only to explore the relationship between the site of an artwork’s making and its display, but also to question the connection between the artist’s working conditions and the presence of her body in space. Playing with notions of scale and trompe l’oeil, her vast installations take as their starting point the exhibition venue, going so far as to focus on the superimposing of temporalities that is at work in the making of her images and render it palpable. The title Wet Rooms points to the darkroom, which the artist sees as a protected space where all kinds of experimentation are conceivable. Although it features different chemical baths that are essential to making the image visible, the space is also a private one in which direct contact with the material reality of photography makes it possible to affirm an individual subjectivity. This constant shifting back and forth between the show venue and the darkroom give rise to collages that boast a dense complex structure and defy any and all fixed notion of space and time.

Sophie Thun was born in 1985 in Frankfort. 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