Thomas Demand, Wallpaper* cover artist and giant of the international contemporary art scene – the two increasingly go hand in hand – gave us a sneak preview of his latest project at his Berlin studio back in March. Now unveiled at the Fondazione Prada space at this month’s Venice Biennale, it is perhaps Demand’s most compelling, certainly most overtly political, work yet.
All of Demand’s works have intriguing, often murky and disturbing back-stories. The back-story to his ‘Yellowcake’ series, exclusively previewed here, is murky and disturbing on a massive scale.
On the morning of 2 January 2001, the Italian police discovered that that Niger Embassy in Rome, a non-descript suite of offices on the sixth floor of 10 Via Antonio Biaimonti, in the neighbourhood between the Vatican and the Olympic Stadium, had been broken into and ransacked. Only a watch and two bottles of perfume had been stolen but paper work was strewn around the office. Some official stamps bearing the seal of the Republic of Niger and stationary were also missing.
Within months, copies of documents were finding their way to intelligence agencies in Europe and the States. They suggested that Saddam Hussein was planning to buy 500 tons of yellowcake - the pure uranium used to make nuclear bombs - from the mineral rich, cash poor Niger.
The documents were forgeries. And not good ones. But in the wake of the 9/11 attacks the US administration took a keen interest in trying to make the yellowcake accusations stick. And the CIA, amongst others, continued to advise that the Niger trail went nowhere. They were ignored and President Bush’s State of the Union address, delivered two years after the break in, included the now infamous 16 word casus belli: ‘The British government has learnt that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.’
Two months later the US invaded Iraq (despite the fact that the International Atomic Energy Agency has also just got hold of the Niger documents and proved they were forgeries with two hours of rudimentary rummaging on Google).
Demand became fascinated at how much history was spinning out of from the small Niger Embassy offices. And through his own bit of tricksiness with the truth, he managed to get access to the embassy and quickly set on recreating it in Berlin.
The photographs of his to-scale cardboard models (all destroyed once Demand has his photographic take) are of an every-office, a place of wires and Post It notes and scattered papers, empty now but showing evidence of disturbance. There is information, data, chaotic, disorganised but here unmarked and innocent. And there are the flags and presidential portraits that do not speak of power but of the lack of power.
Another series, ‘Processo Grottesco’, make clear Demand’s fascination with Grottos. He is currently working on a book on grottos, set to include another Wallpaper* cover from last year.
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Fondazione Prada presents Thomas Demand; 7 June – 7 July 2007; Giorgio Cini Foundation, San Giorgio Maggiore Island, Venice
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Thomas Demand exhibition
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