A red carpet for the audience – images exposed to the gaze of the viewer: this is how Thom Barth presents his work in a current exhibition at the Zeppelin Museum Friedrichshafen, which was created in cooperation with the Zeppelin Museum. The red carpet, on which only state guests usually walk, is here reserved for visitors, who are at once sovereigns and models, flâneurs and image zappers.

Faced with the abundance of images and intense colours that bathe part of the complex room installation in red light, visitors feel as if they are in a museum art gallery. It is difficult for them to escape the influence of their surroundings on their own expectations.

In the installation ‘Welt aus Stellung’ (World from Position), visitors are part of the staging from the very beginning. The constant shift between the position of the observer and the observed, the continuous superimposition of real images with their own reflections or other objects, robs the viewer of the clarity of their standpoint. Thus, they become aware that they are constantly forced to take a position and to become conscious of this position, because the standpoint from which they make statements about the world is part of the statements themselves. The exhibition features around 200 works by Thom Barth, a large part of which are picture cubes being shown in a museum for the first time.

A catalogue (128 pages, approx. 550 colour illustrations) with texts by Dirk Blübaum, Andrea Hofmann, Johannes Meinhardt and Florian Rötzer is being published to accompany the exhibition.

Curator: Andrea Hofmann