Julian Rosefeldt

Galerie Ron Mandos, Amsterdam

11.01.2020 – 15.02.2020

Galerie Ron Mandos proudly presents a solo exhibition by the renowned German artist and filmmaker Julian Rosefeldt (1965). In his films and photographs Rosefeldt creates a highly aesthetic universe, with explicit formal references to the history of cinema and painting, but at the same time dealing with important social and political subjects such as totalitarianism, ecology, homeland and migration, all treated in an ongoing playful dialogue with pop culture.

In his meditative installation In the Land of Drought (2015/17), Rosefeldt looks back from an imagined future upon the post-Anthropocene: the aftermath of significant human influence on Earth. An army of scientists appears to investigate archeologically at the remnants of civilization after humanity has made itself extinct. Shot entirely using a drone in Morocco and the Ruhr area of Germany, Rosefeldt’s images hover meditatively over desolated landscaped and ruins – abandoned film sets close to the Moroccan Atlas Mountains and the remains of industrialization. In the Land of Drought evokes—without any dialogue—a vision of a future exodus of humanity from our devastated planet.

Playing with the black-and-white esthetic of silent movies, Deep Gold (2013–14) is shot in a film studio, with complicated camera movements and a sophisticated dramatic choreography. Conceived as a possible continuation of the legendary film L’Âge d’or (1930) written by Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dali, it is a visual poem, a surrealist trip back to the Berlin of the wild 1920s, characterized by artistic avant-garde, sexual freedom and political apocalypse. Six photographic prints of the film stills accompany the film installation at Galerie Ron Mandos.