Dvir / Paris
Gallery Hours
Tuesday – Thursday: 11:00 – 19:00
Friday – Saturday: 12:00 – 19:00
Thomas Hirschhorn, Fake it, Fake it – till you Fake it., 2023 (detail). Cardboard, prints, tape, polystyrene, and aluminum foil. Courtesy the artist and Gladstone Gallery. Photo: David Regen. © Thomas Hirschhorn / Artists Rights Society.
Thomas Hirschhorn’s new installation at Gladstone looks something like a mash-up of a war room and a dorm room, made out of cardboard and Styrofoam, at 1:1 scale. The cavernous gallery is now a den of mass delusion, crammed with long rows of workstations outfitted with monitors depicting human destruction—mostly bombed buildings in Gaza and Ukraine—and frames from first-person-shooter video games. Gathered around each screen lies what might be called binge paraphernalia: smashed cans of Red Bull, credit cards and cocaine, lighters, Marlboro cigarettes, BlackBerrys, and I ❤️ NY mugs, all made out of supply closet staples, that ubiquitous cardboard and Styrofoam, along with aluminum foil, markers, and tape. Standees of camouflaged soldiers dot the room as if taking it by siege. Some have large emojis—crying, smiling, and cry-smiling—instead of human faces; many more emojis hang from the ceiling like a coming storm. An industrial fan blasting from the back corner adds to this feeling of inclement weather, threatening to render the ad hoc exhibition even more precarious (a favorite word of Hirschhorn’s) than it already is.
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