Sophie Thun's "Stolberggasse": An Exhibition Exploring Photography, Body, and Domestic Environments

This exhibition by Sophie Thun explores the dialectic between the production and presentation of her photographic work, focusing on her body's inscription within exhibition spaces and domestic environments. The show adapts her approach for both physical and digital realms, adapting elements from her apartment.

Sophie Thun's exhibition "Stolberggasse" delves into the recurring themes of the dialectic between the place of production and the presentation of work, and the relationship between her own working situation as an artist and the physical presence of the body. For this exhibition, Thun extends her approach by adapting it for the digital space, with the happenings in the exhibition room streamed live on the Secession website and on a monitor in the foyer. Visitors can access the part of the exhibition not captured by the surveillance camera: the stairwell. Here, Thun reproduces the worn walls decorated in the old style with pattern rollers from her stairwell in Stolberggasse and displays a photograph of herself on the stairs in the half-story. In her characteristic self-representation, Thun references the conventions of depicting the (nude) female body in general, and Marcel Duchamp's iconic painting "Nude Descending a Staircase" (1912) and its reception in particular. In the exhibition space, visible in real-time on the screen, the artist has set up her darkroom to produce photograms of objects from her apartment in Stolberggasse, Vienna, in solitude. The inventory she develops ranges from toothbrushes and kitchen utensils to books, tools, and paper clips to hair ties, with the only exclusion criterion being the size of the objects not exceeding the 8×10” format of the large-format negative. Alongside her work equipment and the continuously growing collection of black-and-white photograms, her installation also includes the multi-part color photograph "Looking at the Window." As a trompe-l'œil, it depicts the window behind the photograph at a 1:1 scale, but it was boarded up to darken the room. The view outwards, the connection to the outside, remains an illusion, and the gaze is instead thrown back onto the interior space. The unchanging daylight and season in the image can also be read as a sign of standstill, referring to photography as a paused moment as well as the situation of lockdown.

The exhibition is described as being located in the Graphic Cabinet, which remains closed to visitors. However, visitors can enter the part of the exhibition not captured by the surveillance camera, which is the stairwell. The exhibition also features a live stream of the exhibition space available on the Secession website and on a monitor in the foyer. Information on tickets can be found via a link to the Secession shop. General museum opening hours are Tue-Sun, 10 am - 6 pm.