With "Wassermusik", Haus der Kunst presents the new exhibition by Cyprien Gaillard, to coincide with the end of this year’s Oktoberfest. At the centre of the exhibition is the artist’s latest stereoscopic motion picture Retinal Rivalry (2024), partially filmed at Munich’s Oktoberfest, and co-produced by Haus der Kunst. By harnessing cutting-edge technology, Gaillard offers an expanded, sharpened vision of the world around us. This key work leads viewers on a journey through folded time and inaccessible urban surfaces: dumpsters and subterranean arteries, humid landscape, and views through the eyes of the Bavaria statue at Oktoberfest. It thus enters into a close dialogue with the city of Munich and its folk festival, having it linger on as if in a strange memory, disrupting conventional perception with a sculptural and psychedelic space, and dissolving the narrative to reveal pure vision.
Water permeates the new body of works in this solo presentation by Cyprien Gaillard. Working at the intersection of human artefacts, urban geography, and psychology, Gaillard’s cosmos gives new form to such phenomena as civilisational upheaval and geological time. Across photography, sculpture, film, video, collage, installation, and live performance, his work embraces a poetry of decay that rearranges history to shed new light on the present.
In “Wassermusik”, Gaillard attunes to water as an elemental force—passing through time and linking traces in collapsed histories. Through architectural interventions, film, sculpture, and archival materials, he modifies the Südgalerie with remnants such as 1930s exit signage, more recent furniture, a well-trodden carpet, revealing the strata of tenants who once inhabited the building. Among the most enduring non-human witnesses are the ammonite fossils on the marble floors, glimmering with splashes of water.
Works created by the artist from two archives frame the exhibition: Haus der Kunst in Munich and Musée de l'Orangerie in Paris, both sites bearing scars from the Second World War. A selection of furniture from Haus der Kunst recalls the negotiations of its past tenants over the building’s repurposing. Photographs document the water leakage at the Musée de l'Orangerie during the summer of 1944, when bombings caused ceilings to collapse: water creeping across surfaces, the peeling fabric revealing ghostly floral patterns. Through this assembly of materials, Gaillard stages a dialogue between natural forces and human constructs, rendering sites into living monuments.
This exhibition continues Haus der Kunst’s vision in reimagining the meaning of monuments that have lost their original purposes and meanings, and in exploring how public monuments can generate new significance and collective experience. Following solo exhibitions such as “Voices” by Philippe Parreno, “Mute” by Pan Daijing, and “Window of Tolerance” by Wang Shui, Gaillard’s new exhibition furthers Haus der Kunst’s experimental programme, integrating forefront technology, time-based media, and exploring liveness as a new form of exhibition-making and artistic practice.
The film Retinal Rivalry is co-commissioned by Haus der Kunst and premiered at Fondation Beyeler in the summer of 2024.
Curated by Xue Tan with Lydia Antoniou and Laila Wu.