Exhibitions
A list of current & upcoming exhibitions by current and past artists connected to the Thinking Tools research group.
Marta Djourina: Glowing Attraction
Haus am Kleist Park (Berlin), 17/01/2025-16/03/2025
The artist Marta Djourina zeroes in on natural light phenomena and makes them visible in astonishing ways. Djourina intentionally refrains from using a camera, opting to explore the effects of various sources of light on photo paper instead. In her abstract works, light itself turns into color.
With her analog practice, the artist sets a counterpoint to today’s digital forms of work and returns to the origins of the photographic medium. For Djourina, light is not just a creative element but is itself the object of study, tool, and subject of her work. Marta Djourina’s ability to visualize phenomena that could otherwise only be experienced in a lab or under other special conditions is truly unique.
The exhibition presents works from the series “Glowing Attraction” (2019/20), created via bioluminescent algae, and from the series “Foxfire” (2021-2023), which trace the glow of bioluminescent fungi. We also see works from the series “Ashes of Ice” (2023) and “Fluid Contact” (2023 -).
Léonard Pongo
Festival du Jeu de Paume (Paris), 07/02/2025-23/03/2025
Paysages mouvants
Moving Landscapes, presented from 7 February to 23 March 2025, is imagined as a collective narrative, combining representations of natural environments and the imaginative repertoires used to convey them. Curator Jeanne Mercier has invited screenwriter Loo Hui Phang to collaborate in the form of a voice that narrates the works—many of which were specially produced for this event—by fifteen artists, active on the current art scene. Each piece makes use of a natural space—the jungle, oasis, sky, desert, forest, etc.—associated with certain stereotypes, but offers a new imaginative repertoire to evoke them.
According to Léonard Pongo, its is from peregrination in the environment and sensory experience that a vision of the world emerges. At inspired by Congolese traditions and Luba cultures, Tales from the Source presents the landscape as a a character with a will and power of its own. The work is like an open book telling the story of humanity and the planet, with Congo at its heart. Visitors are invited to become one with the landscape, wandering through superimposed images, layers and projections, recreating a complex, vibrant landscape. Léonard Pongo presents the DRC not as a resource to be exploited, but as a source of life for the entire for the entire planet, a place that is essential to understanding the relationship to our environment. Tales from the Source tells another tale of human history in which the Congo Basin, its power and wealth, both physical and immaterial, play a major role in rebuilding a common future.
Sophie Thun: Wet Rooms
Musée Cantonal des Beaux Arts (Lausanne), 14/03/2025 – 10/08/2025
Sophie Thun (*1985 in Frankfort, lives and works in Vienna) mainly works with analog photography. She is always looking to push the medium’s technical possibilities further, not only to explore the relationship between the site of an artwork’s making and its display, but also to question the connection between the artist’s working conditions and the presence of her body in space. Playing with notions of scale and trompe l’oeil, her vast installations take as their starting point the exhibition venue, going so far as to focus on the superimposing of temporalities that is at work in the making of her images and render it palpable.
Wet Rooms is her first solo show in Switzerland. The title Wet Rooms points to the darkroom, which the artist sees as a protected space where all kinds of experimentation are conceivable. Although it features different chemical baths that are essential to making the image visible, the space is also a private one in which direct contact with the material reality of photography makes it possible to affirm an individual subjectivity. This constant shifting back and forth between the show venue and the darkroom give rise to collages that boast a dense complex structure and defy any and all fixed notion of space and time.
