In his expansive installations, he questions the relationship between the individual and the masses, the self and the collective. By deconstructing conventional value systems and scientific models, Zipp opens up the field for new questions.
Thomas Zipp is developing a complex spatial installation for the Kunsthalle Gießen, which will be performed at irregular intervals. The starting point is the exhibition ‘The Family of Man’, which opened in 1955 at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and was added to the UNESCO World Heritage List in 2003. The aim of this exhibition was to promote an international exchange. Edward Steichen, then head of the photography department at MoMA and curator of the exhibition, hoped to use the universal language of photography to promote understanding between people, break down prejudices and overcome barriers between different classes, religions and ethnicities. ‘The Family of Man’ – humanity as a family – was divided into 32 themes such as work, love, faith, birth, family, children, war and peace, which were shown in over 500 correspondingly organised photographs. Amateur photos were displayed alongside works by renowned artists on an equal footing, thus formally supporting the idea of equal togetherness. The emotional power of the exhibition was also intended to highlight the unique diversity of different forms of humanity that would be destroyed in the event of a nuclear war, taking into account the global situation at the time.
The staging in the Kunsthalle Gießen reinterprets ‘The Family of Man’. Thomas Zipp merges the once separate themes and brings together the complex facets of life in a multimedia installation. By building a small housing estate, the artist, who was born in 1966 in Heppenheim in southern Hesse, creates a world in which the visitor moves through the supposedly banal lifestyles of various people on a 1:1 scale. You enter their kitchens, look into other people’s bedrooms, peek through doors, observe people in their everyday lives and, not least, take a look into human abysses. Seemingly connected by the familiar everyday, each person’s individual lifestyle undermines the standardised image of society. In Thomas Zipp’s work, this fragility of communal agreements and conventions is consistently brought to the fore.
Private photos from estates, which the artist has been collecting for years, are incorporated into the exhibition as slide projections and allow the stages of a stranger’s life to glide past. The former Städel student, who is now himself a professor at the Berlin University of the Arts, celebrates banal everyday life as well as psychological predispositions and delusional compulsions, tracing them and exposing obsessions that were sometimes carefully and guilelessly or even knowingly cultivated.
When they are sold, often at flea markets, once private pictures are publicised, but at the same time lose their individual, emotional significance. By embedding them in the context of an exhibition, they regain their original importance, albeit with a shift in meaning. The artist makes a selective choice of pictorial impressions from someone else’s life and thus, as it were, directs their moral judgement. By rejecting certain images, the visitor also passes judgement on their creators and their lives. Zipp subtly undermines the notion of harmonious coexistence propagated by the MoMA exhibition in 1955, simultaneously creating space for reflection on social norms and the judgement of ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ based on them.
In keeping with his formative working method, Zipp also combines individual elements of earlier works in the Kunsthalle Gießen to create a new Gesamtkunstwerk. He reacts directly to the exhibition space and, although the medium of painting is an essential part of his oeuvre, here he dispenses entirely with the classic panel painting. The temporal context in which the expansive installation takes place remains diffuse. While an armada of twelve rockets with their camouflage-coloured tips rises menacingly into the air and a dainty tractor transports another projectile instead of the harvest, on the one hand the artist refers specifically to the shadows of the Cold War, against the backdrop of which the New York exhibition took place. On the other hand, the missiles are a universally valid and globally legible symbol of technological progress and the willingness of individual states to assert their own interests by force if necessary. Fear serves as the motor of armament. Instead of the classic canvas, Zipp paints the outer shell of the missiles, whose strict geometry of black and white surfaces is reminiscent of the Russian avant-garde, but also of similar military camouflage paintings from the first half of the 20th century. He disguises their inherent violence in beauty.
The main title of the exhibition, ‘A Primer of Higher Space’, also refers to the sculptural placement in space. The artist thus refers to a treatise from 1913 in which the American architect Claude Fayette Bragdon reflects on the 4th dimension. Situated between mysticism and mathematics, it is not conceived in spatial terms, but pursues the principle of growth and understands it as change. While the rocket is capable of overcoming spatial boundaries and thus turning the former idea of progress into reality, Thomas Zipp processes Bragdon’s theory of the 4th dimension performatively. His houses are inhabited at irregular intervals by real people who occupy the memory-heavy spaces in groups of varying sizes and constellations.
Thomas Zipp transforms the Kunsthalle into a world in which temporal and spatial dimensions are cancelled out and the past, present, future and possible are condensed into an artificial world.
