Unseen: Julian Rosefeldt

Unseen published an article about the work of Julian Rosefeldt that will be presented during Unseen Amsterdam 2023 at our gallery booth 65. The article was written by Flor Linckens.

“It’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.” This quote, attributed to both Fredric Jameson and Slavoj Žižek, featured in the seminal work Capitalist Realism by Mark Fisher. The late political and cultural theorist argued that in our discourse, we are not truly considering any alternatives to capitalism in a serious way, since “capitalism occupies the horizons of the thinkable” — it is intertwined with how we see and consider the world around us. German artist Julian Rosefeldt is equally intrigued by capitalism and the sway it holds over us; at Unseen, his photography work will be on display in the Galerie Ron Mandos booth.

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ABOUT Julian Rosefeldt

Julian Rosefeldt was born in 1965 in Munich, Germany
He lives and works in Berlin, Germany

Julian Rosefeldt’s work reflects the artist’s fascination with day-to-day reality, and the stereotypes, clichés and mindless repetitions that suffuse popular culture. Since the mid-1990s Rosefeldt has been producing complex film and video installations, as well as photographs, through which we can observe from a cool, detached perspective the formulaic imagery and content that is generated by contemporary media.

The artist has made a name for himself with lavishly produced 16mm and 35mm films. Projected onto several screens to create a panorama-like effect, his films carry the viewer off into a surreal, theatrical world whose inhabitants are caught in the structures and rituals of everyday life. Almost all his works are characterized by their complex interweaving of several dimensions of reality, a device used to expose the production process. Thus, his films are also a homage to the medium of film and a reflection on the construction of fictional narratives, using cinematographic and iconographic means.

Rosefeldt studied architecture in Munich and Barcelona before starting his artistic career with found-footage video installations such as Detonation Deutschland (1996), Asylum (2001-02), Trilogy of Failure (2004–05), The Ship of Fools (2007), American Night (2009), and, more recently, Manifesto (2015). Rosefeldt’s works are in many important museum and private collections all over the world, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the National Gallery, Berlin; and the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney. Since 2011, he holds a professorship for digital and time-based media at the Akademie der Bildenden Künste, Munich.

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