Sophie Thun
The work of Sophie Thun oscillates between the Self and its photographic representation vis-à-vis the exploration of a multifaceted Other. Thun has become known for her complex, life-sized self-portraits, which she combines with photograms of her own body. She then photographs herself together with the resulting images and exhibits these layers of self-depiction in wall-filling dimensions at the exhibition space, which is also where these works are typically produced. Such visual proliferation of the Self poses questions not only about endlessly burgeoning media representation amidst a ubiquitous selfie
culture but also regarding the technical apparatus itself. In many photographs, Thun is seen with a self-timer and a trigger in her hand or pictured standing behind her large format analog photo camera—thus hinting at a no-longer-common photographic practice that recent times have seen employed mostly for artistic purposes. The life-sized photographic output on paper rolls or test strips is frequently marked by flaws that occur in the darkroom, flaws that the artist deliberately heightens in her superimposition and inscription of multiple photographic realities onto the light-sensitive paper. One of Thun’s artistic tropes has been to set up a working darkroom in the space where she exhibits her work. A somewhat clandestine version of this was realized in her exhibition at the Vienna Secession immediately following the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic in the spring of 2020. Due to the ensuing lockdown, surveillance cameras were installed in the gallery that enabled visitors to watch the action in real time on the website. After the Secession reopened, Thun’s working and printing process inside the darkroom was shown on a monitor in the foyer. While the main hall was still closed to visitors, people could enter the part of the presentation that was not being shown on closed-circuit video—namely, the stairwell. There, the artist had installed a photo showing the battered walls of the stairwell in the building in which she lives and collaged her own nude portraits into it as a reference to Marcel Duchamp’s iconic “Nude Descending a Staircase” of 1912. In many of her works, Thun analyzes the history of self-portraiture in light of her own (frequently naked) body through layers of representational signifiers denoting body positivity of a sort that enables the artist to assert self-empowerment while simultaneously circumventing any cliches associated with the female body in general. Here, the photographic apparatus helps her to embody both prop and prosthesis in a quest after the Self and its forms of malleability. W.S.
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