Nothing Is Original by Julian Rosefeldt at C/O Berlin

With Nothing is Original, C/O Berlin dedicates a comprehensive exhibition to artist and filmmaker Julian Rosefeldt, presenting for the first time works from a total of thirty years.

Overview

Through previously unpublished storyboards, sketches, set photographs, and making-of documentation, the exhibition offers a rare glimpse behind the scenes of his image production. 

Rosefeldt is one of the leading contemporary artists and filmmakers today. In his elaborately staged film and video installations, he works with museum spaces, theaters, opera houses, and postindustrial zones, always challenging the mechanisms of image production as well as the construction of narratives and ideologies. His works oscillate between fiction and documentary research, between staging and analysis. 

A major theme in his work is the deconstruction of classic film genres and television formats. By breaking down westerns and gangster films, slapstick and science fiction, as well as news broadcasts and soap operas into their basic narrative components, he reveals their structures. In American Night (2008/2009), for example, he takes up iconic motifs from westerns—from the solitary rider on the prairie to the saloon brawl—and disrupts familiar imagery with unexpected references to film, politics, and pop culture. This technique of appropriation and citation is combined with a media-archaeological approach, in which Rosefeldt uses archival material and found footage to expose narrative stereotypes, historical myths, and cultural classification systems. He collages and recombines existing images, texts, and cinematic elements to create new layers of meaning. 

The exhibition title Nothing is Original also refers to this principle: it is taken from Jim Jarmusch’s Golden Rules of Filmmaking, which in turn cites Jean-Luc Godard. As Jarmusch writes, “Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination. […] It’s not where you take things from—it’s where you take them to.” 

Another focus of the exhibition is the examination of history and ideologies. Rosefeldt frequently reflects on the traces of the Nazi era that extend into the present as well as the translation of political and social narratives. In the four-channel installation Meine Heimat ist ein düsteres, wolkenverhangenes Land (My Home Is a Dark and Cloud-Hung Land; 2011), he surveys the German concept of Heimat, meaning “home” or “homeland,” and challenges the ideological charge of landscape and national sentiment. 

Rosefeldt is also interested in looking behind the scenes: many of his works address the fine line between stage and backstage, fiction and reality. By revealing processes of film production, he explores the role of the medium in constructing reality. This reflection about film and staging is apparent in Rosefeldt’s way of combining different media in his work. His films not only involve social narratives; they also address cinema itself: as an archive, field of experimentation, and producer of myths. 

Nothing is Original at C/O Berlin not only provides a comprehensive insight into Rosefeldt’s film oeuvre; the exhibition also examines his creative process. Spector Books will publish a catalog to accompany the exhibition, taking a closer look at Rosefeldt’s artistic methodology.