Thomas Hirshhorn. 3 “Easycollage” and 6 “Collage-Truth”

With 3 “Easycollage” and 6 “Collage-Truth”, Thomas Hirschhorn transforms the MAN Museum’s project room into an uncomfortable space full of provocative suggestion and visual contrasts. The project, curated by Lorenzo Giusti, proposes a series of large-scale works and other smaller ones, created between 2012 and 2015, in which fashion photographs live side by side with war photos. 

The sense of estrangement and repulsion triggered by the vision of the collages is the weapon with which Hirschhorn carries on his battle against a simplified relationship with the image and against the tendency of mass media photography to concentrate only on partial aspects of reality, which is what photography claims to capture, by removing the shades of meaning. 

The imposition on the eye of bodies torn apart by war and at the same time of bodies idealized by advertising and marketing, parallels in appearance contrary to all logic of sense and aesthetics, represents a mindful strategy that aims to invert the process of assuefaction/hypersensitivation induced by the media. 

Thomas Hirschhorn’s works intend to create awareness among viewers of their visual experiences, to come to grips with their sensitivity and recognize the need for careful critical thought when dealing with the world of the media and, more in general, with geopolitical realities and social conditions today. 

The 3 “Easycollage” and 6 “Collage-Truth”project develops along the pathway of an investigation of the collage as an instrument of critical analysis traced by Hirschhorn in recent years. His is an investigation in which the artist places side-by-side site-specific works that respond to the precise design of critically analyzing society (atmospheres created for the most part with poor materials and objects of daily use) and participatory operations that call for direct involvement of the public, as in the case of his “Presence and Production” projects such as “Deleuze Monument” (Avignon, 2000), “Bataille Monument” (Kassel, 2002), “24h Foucault” (Paris, 2004), “The Bijlmer Spinoza-Festival” (Amsterdam, 2009), “Gramsci Monument” (New York, 2013) and “Flamme éternelle” (Paris, 2014).