Archive presents a scene of more than 200 square-shaped paper document boxes stacked on shelves and on the floor. The overall tone is gloomy, creating a solemn, depressing atmosphere. The source of this image is the archive of German director Leni Riefenstahl. She is best known for her documentaries Triumph of the Will (1935), which documented the 1934 Nazi Party Congress in Nuremberg, held after Hitler consolidated his hold on power, and Olympia (1938), which recorded the 1936 Berlin Olympics and won the best film award at the Venice Film Festival. Though both films are recognized for their high level of aesthetic and technical sophistication, they remain deeply controversial due to their status as works of propaganda created at the behest of the Nazi regime. The image of neatly stacked identical boxes in Archive brings to mind the characteristics of fascist aesthetics that Susan Sontag highlights in her essay “Fascinating Fascism”: “the massing of groups of people; the turning of people into things; the multiplication or replication of things … ” On multiple levels, Archive presents the dynamic relationship between images or film and political history—visual mediums may not just record history, but also actively influence its development. These silent boxes are like a disciplined, forbidding procession, the essence of an era of madness collected inside them. Demand’s work also seems like it could be a still frame taken from a historical film: without context unremarkable at first glance, yet shocking upon closer examination.

This work presents us with an office space in a state of chaos: cabinets are open, drawers have been thrown onto the floor, and papers are strewn across a table and on the floor. Within this tableau of disorder, only an articulated office lamp in the upper center and the gray windows in the background seem to be solid, silently watching all that is going on. Even though there is paper everywhere, no text is visible. The blank printer paper offers no clear explanations for the piece. In fact, the scene reconstructed in this work is of the office of East Germany’s secret police, the Stasi. During the rule of the Socialist Unity Party of Germany, they conducted extensive surveillance on citizens, generating hundreds of millions of paper files in the process. In November 1989, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Stasi staff attempted to destroy their archives by hand and with tools such as shredders. Their critics opposed this action, arguing that the files should be retained for the public to view. Photographs of looted Stasi offices during this historical moment provided the blueprint for Demand’s piece. He has used an array of paper to “colorize” a black and white image from the media. Here, the image created by the artist restores a historical scene, while also hinting at the moral and political implications of paper’s role in this particular incident.

Studio reproduces the set of the television quiz show Was bin ich? In this program hosted by Robert Lembke, minor celebrities were invited to guess the occupation of a mystery guest by asking questions. The show was an immediate hit with audiences when it first aired on German television in the 1950s, and set the tone for a genre of talk shows which would become highly popular in the years to come. In this piece, Demand removes the show’s protagonists from the frame. The empty table and chairs, as well as the blank name cards, put forward a strong sense of absence, which sharply contrasts the dazzling colors of the backdrop. The colorful studio background that Demand uses also draws out a tension between reality and fabrication: when the show was first broadcast, the backdrop was black and white. Here, Demand once again explores the relationship between collective memory and reality, which is filled with gaps and absences. At the same time he seems to be reminding viewers how television manufactures images as a communications medium, and how the truth we perceive through an attitude of “seeing is believing” is constructed in the same manner.

Poll presents us with one corner of a room where electoral ballots are being counted by hand. Stacks of ballots, desk phones, flashlights, and post-it notes are spread across counting desks. Through these ostensibly mundane minor details, Demand reveals a crucial moment in the 2000 American presidential election contested between then-Governor of Texas George W. Bush and Vice President Al Gore. The election results saw the two candidates neck and neck, with the vote in Florida deciding the contest. Gore’s side requested the manual recount of 70,000 suspicious ballots in the hopes that it would make up for counting errors caused by the irregular “punching” of ballots. In this work, Demand is no longer only using paper as a medium for the representation of other things, but also returning to the characteristics of the material itself. By using paper to represent ballots made of the same material, he emphasizes its significance in this historical scene: the future course of the country and the fate of hundreds of millions of people depended on these otherwise unexceptional lightweight paper ballots. Though the majority of his works take roughly two-to-three-months to complete, Demand created this piece in only three weeks, and thus was able to show it for the first time before Bush was sworn in as the 43rd president of the United States.

Clearing depicts an idyllic scene of a forest with golden sunlight streaming through its thick canopy. Demand used over 270,000 paper leaves to reproduce a view of one corner of Vencie’s Giardini della Biennale. He collaborated with a professional cameraman and utilized a 10,000-watt light usually used in the film industry to create the piece’s extremely realistic light and shadow effects. The lush foliage under intense chiaroscuro produces a sense of cinematic depth and texture. Influenced by Swiss painter Arnold Böcklin and German painter Hans von Marées, both active in the nineteenth century, Demand’s overlapping trees and shadows hint at the mysterious, abstract relationship between humans and nature, while also revealing to us that natural environments are sometimes more manufactured than we might assume. By using paper as medium to make concrete philosophical views of nature, the piece also poses a question to viewers: in a world where human intervention into the environment knows no limits, and traces of human presence are everywhere, how should we redefine our understanding of nature, and what parts of it should be preserved unaltered?

This piece shows a vault room where art is being stored. Paintings of different sizes lean against each other, with only the back of their frames visible. Because we are unable to see the paintings in their true form, the scene feels mysterious and desolate. In 2011, police in Paris conducted a raid on the Wildenstein Institute and discovered more than 30 paintings and sculptures that had been missing for decades. These included works by Edgar Degas, Édouard Manet, Berthe Morisot, and other celebrated artists. The pieces belonged to the Rouart family, who had entrusted their estate to the Wildensteins, a family of art dealers. However, the Wildensteins were found to have hidden a number of works, which caused severe damage to their reputation. Demand’s choice of image here may suggest his thoughts on the value and significance of artworks—when art is reduced to a carrier of greed and seized as evidence, it loses its luster, creating an embarrassing state of affairs.

This piece is titled Control Room, and it presents us with a generic industrial space, full of all different kinds of indicator panels, joysticks, display screens, and gauges. File folders, which seem to contain operating manuals, are stacked on top of each other on the consoles, or sit with their pages left open. However, as keeping with Demand’s other works, the screens on the control panel are blank, as are the documents on top of the desks. No text, numbers, or human figures are visible in this scene. The entire space is empty and still. When we look more closely, we can observe that the ceiling panels of this seemingly orderly control room are hanging loose, on the verge of falling down. Could this be a sign of danger? In fact, Demand created this scene based on a cellphone photograph that a technician from the Tokyo Electric Power Company took of the stricken Fukushima Daichii Nuclear Power Plant control room in the aftermath of the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami. What the artist wants to convey to the audience here is how the dissemination of disaster photographs through the media and Internet does not allow us to see any given disaster itself, but rather presents us with images of it. In this piece Demand uses to his standard creative process to once again reproduce an image of a disaster, underlining the distance between images of an event and the event itself.

Here, Demand has recreated a 1952 photo of Matisse’s studio. In the original photo, Matisse sits in a wheelchair, holding colored paper and scissors as an assistant crouches to the side, watching him work. It was in this studio in the Hotel Regina in Nice that Matisse worked on paper cut-outs from 1949 until his death in 1954. Due to his limited mobility, Matisse would make paper cut-outs his medium of choice during his later years. His assistants would first use gouache to add colors to white paper, which Matisse then cut into different organic shapes and arranged into compositions. Using simple tools, Matisse was able to create a resplendent, multicolored world full of animals, plants, and people. In Atelier, Demand has removed Matisse and his assistant from the scene, but left the floor littered with pieces of colored paper that have had shapes cut out of them. It is as if the artist has just finished his work and left the studio. Though both Demand and Matisse use paper as a medium, their creative methods are quite different. It is also worth noting how Atelier and the adjacent piece Copyshop both directly refer to the ways in which images may be produced, yet present completely different manifestations of this process. Copyshop is cold and harsh in tone, full of machinery for mechanical duplication, while Atelier shares with us Matisse’s varied practice, full of color and creativity.

This piece restages a press conference Donald Trump held in January 2017, his first after winning the American presidential election. A pile of folders was theatrically arranged for all to see on a low table next to the podium. At the press conference, Trump’s tax lawyer declared that he was to completely step away from the management of his business empire, handing the reins over to his two sons and other company executives to avoid any potential conflict of interest. The stack of documents was presented as apparent “evidence” of Trump relinquishing control over his commercial affairs. The lawyer further emphasized that the law did not require the president-elect to give up his business interests, but that Trump was nevertheless choosing to do so. However, when journalists wished to take a closer look at the files, Trump’s reaction was one of extreme reluctance, echoing his previous refusal to disclose his tax records. Was the material inside the beige folders just blank white paper, like the documents in Demand’s other works? We cannot know for sure. In this piece, Demand emphasizes once again how paper, a fragile material, can assume great importance in major historical events. At this press conference, the paper shaped what was presented as political “truth.”

This piece presents us with a destroyed living room. There are broken plastic chairs, a cabinet, a television, a sofa, and a single inconspicuous slipper amongst the rubble. The work is based on a photograph taken in Gaza after a missile attack, but this image could be from any war-torn region. It could be said that here Demand has created a “standard image” of war’s destruction of life. Sadly, the clouds of war have long loomed over humanity, making this image a regrettably ubiquitous one. As Susan Sontag pointed out in Regarding the Pain of Others, “Photographs of an atrocity may give rise to opposing responses. A call for peace. A cry for revenge. Or simply the bemused awareness, continually restocked by photographic information, that terrible things happen.” Even though the victims of war are absent from this scene—just like the would-be protagonists in Demand’s other works—the artist clearly illustrates war’s brutality, and expresses his concern over the numbness that an endless stream of images of war might induce.

Throughout Thomas Demand’s oeuvre, the “model” serves as the artist’s means for observing and understanding the world. The last section of the exhibition presents work from the “Model Studies” series. On display here are Demand’s photographs of two different sets of paper models, one of patterns on paper by fashion designer Azzedine Alaïa, the other of building models by architecture firm SANAA. Demand began the series in 2011, when he started to closely study incomplete architectural models during a residency at the Getty Research Institute. He shoots these models in different environments and lighting conditions, emphasizing the physical characteristics of the models themselves, as well as the marks that their designers’ thinking has left upon them. He has continued this working method in the two groups of works we see in front of us. It is as if Demand has observed the rich colors and dynamic vitality of bird feathers within Alaïa’s paper models; and under the artist’s lens, SANAA’s models are not only expressions of architectural concepts, but also abstract sculptures which are independent works in their own right. This series reveals the textures and colors of paper from close up, inviting us to imagine the material's tactility and re-examine the foundations on which our world and existence are built.