Johan Grimonprez. All Memory is Theft

With »All Memory Is Theft«, the ZKM presents its extensive retrospective on Belgian film and media artist Johan Grimonprez (*1962), whose work explores the boundaries between theory and practice, art and cinema, documentary and fiction.

“Who owns our imagination in a world of existential vertigo where truth has become a shipwrecked refugee? Is it the storyteller who can contain contradictions, who can slip between the languages we have been given to become a time-traveler of the imagination?” (Johan Grimonprez)

Informed by an archaeology of present-day media, Grimonprez combines fragments from films, television news, advertising, cinema, home movies and the Internet to weave new narratives that question the way we perceive our reality. Grimonprez’ works, which have been presented at the world’s premier museums and received accolades at a host of festivals, bring to our attention the extent to which actuality and imagination, CNN and Hollywood as modes of presentation have become intertwined. In doing so, they emphasize the complexity of our media-saturated present, which is more susceptible than ever to manipulation in times of populism and conspiracy theories running rampant on the internet.

The exhibition presents works by Johan Grimonprez from the last 30 years in a multi-layered journey, weaving an intertextual web that connects moving images, archival material, and quotes. It includes film installations, long and short films, vlogs, story boards and drawings by the artist, spanning all the way from his early work like »Kobarweng or Where is your Helicopter« (1992) and his multi-channel installation “It will be alright if you come again (…)” (1994) via his 1997 documenta X contribution »dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y« up to his latest film »Soundtrack to a Coup d‘Etat« (2024), which was co-produced by the ZKM for this exhibition and received an Oscar® nomination as best documentary picture – a flurry of archival footage telling the story of Congolese independence from Belgian colonial rule in 1960 and the assassination of the first freely elected prime minister Patrice Lumumba, tracing connections between jazz music, geopolitics, and colonial power dynamics during the Cold War.

Referencing Paul Virilio, Johan Grimonprez once said that every technology produces its own accident: “When you invent the ship, you also invent the shipwreck; when you invent the plane you also invent the plane crash,” as the French philosopher and media theorist put it. One could add, with the invention of virtual reality and AI, reality has been accidented. Grimonprez’ works therefore not only point out that nowadays media don’t need to catch up with reality any longer, but today, it is rather reality that has to catch up with media.