Sophie Thun
Sophie Thun, Vienna, 25 February 2025
“My interest in projection comes from painting.”
Part of what drew her to art, remarked Sophie Thun in a 2020 conversation with Daniel Spoerri, is her fondness for being alone unto herself: “I’ll happily spend hours upon hours working in the darkroom.” In keeping with this predilection, the present Kontakt Video Portrait with Thun is set in her own darkroom in Vienna’s 7th district. In this positively tiny space, the German-Polish artist muses on the (light-)permeable boundaries between painting and photography—musings that include mental images of (exhibition) spaces that tell of temporal distance when viewed. Why would working on pictures in a darkroom sharpen one’s sense of hearing, of all things? And what happens when one takes repeated pictures of a picture? (The picture disappears.) It is such questions that concern Thun, who had just received the Otto Brecha Award as well as the Hans Purrmann Award and was in the midst of preparing an exhibition in Lausanne entitled “Wet Rooms” when this conversation took place.
“My interest in projection comes from painting.”
Part of what drew her to art, remarked Sophie Thun in a 2020 conversation with Daniel Spoerri, is her fondness for being alone unto herself: “I’ll happily spend hours upon hours working in the darkroom.” In keeping with this predilection, the present Kontakt Video Portrait with Thun is set in her own darkroom in Vienna’s 7th district. In this positively tiny space, the German-Polish artist muses on the (light-)permeable boundaries between painting and photography—musings that include mental images of (exhibition) spaces that tell of temporal distance when viewed. Why would working on pictures in a darkroom sharpen one’s sense of hearing, of all things? And what happens when one takes repeated pictures of a picture? (The picture disappears.) It is such questions that concern Thun, who had just received the Otto Brecha Award as well as the Hans Purrmann Award and was in the midst of preparing an exhibition in Lausanne entitled “Wet Rooms” when this conversation took place.