Cyprien Gaillard – When you expect flutes, it's whistles

Description

Cyprien Gaillard moves through cities and their outskirts in his works. Entropy is his means of design: erosion and deposits are understood as traces – not simply as signs of loss and decay. His works reject resilience as an interpretive framework. Instead, they show life in inhospitable places as something that simply persists – uncommented and non-judgmental. At Kunsthaus Bregenz, Gaillard has installed a construction slide behind the exterior facade, through which remnants of demolition buildings have been transported multiple times. This debris slide made of orange pipes, hanging on chains and interlocked, symbolizes disposal, deconstruction, destruction, and an endless reconstruction. On the ground floor, we are greeted by Visitant, 2021–2026, a massive inflatable sculpture, a kind of fleeting guest, a ghost with restless gestures and no fixed form. Such figures are familiar from festivals, sports fields, or car dealerships. At Kunsthaus Bregenz, it dances to a choreography programmed by the artist. The music comes from the KILLASAN Soundsystem, which is characteristic of Berlin's underground music scene and was originally built in the 90s for a club in Osaka. Gaillard takes this oversized being out of its usual context and places it in the foyer of Kunsthaus Bregenz – a space with its austere design that stands for contemplative engagement with art, which is broken here by the presence of Visitant. The hollow figure moves, inflates, and collapses, too large to stand upright completely: a movable, externally controlled entity made only of air and a nylon shell. Several times an hour, loud, penetrating music starts, creating a club atmosphere for a brief moment. The Visitant impresses equally with its size and its surprisingly gentle movements. A recurring motif of the exhibition is “Deterrents” – means of deterrence. In fact, public space is often shaped and controlled through targeted interventions. Benches, fences, but also light, sounds, or music are used in a way that welcomes some people and keeps others away. Those marginalized by society are further pushed away. Power operates from the hidden, preventive, and normative. Gaillard is interested in the interfaces of attraction and repulsion. For example, classical music in public places is not used as a cultural enhancement but as a deterrent and a method to mark who is welcome and who is not. What is celebrated as high culture in concert halls is used here, according to Gaillard, as a “gentle weapon.” On the first upper floor, new works combining photography, collage, and sculpture are on view. They consist of groupings of nine Polaroids each, arranged in a diamond shape on a piece of cardboard. Hung on the wall and tensioned with metal wire, they are forced into a semi-upright position by their curvature. This visual archive, which Gaillard has been capturing in the now-defunct Polaroid Spectra format until 2011, presents a kaleidoscopic view of familiar and unfamiliar places, preserved objects, and natural structures shaped by human intervention. Polaroids are inherently unchangeable, giving them a documentary character. Carefully selected and presented without glass or protection, these photographs reveal their fragility. They are both private observations and societal testimonies of public institutions and cultural identity. In the second upper floor of KUB, Gaillard references the well-known German legend of the Pied Piper of Hamelin. There, Gaillard has equipped flutes with zero-euro banknotes, rolled up like cigarette paper or tubes for drug consumption. These are real, zero-euro banknotes issued by the European Central Bank, but they hold no actual value – featuring images of the Pied Piper and the city of Hamelin. Thus, the image of music is linked with consumption and seduction, value and deception, intoxication and displacement. Another work in this level continues this idea: on the walls, fanned sculptures made of stainless steel bulge out. Gaillard developed these objects in collaboration with a manufacturer of ATM accessories, inspired by Italian shading devices for bank machines. On the floor lie color cartridges and other components from dismantled ATMs, which were returned to the producer after being broken open. When an ATM is forcibly opened, they dye the bills blue, rendering them unusable. Similar to the disassembled flutes that refer to interruptions in air circulation, the stolen marked bills can no longer circulate. It’s about the moment when value turns into worthlessness and the hidden violence that emerges there. “Public space is no longer a place of coexistence, but increasingly a stage of exclusion,” says Cyprien Gaillard. In the third upper floor, DETERRENT, 2026, a new production filmed in Los Angeles and various Northern European cities, is on view. The film was produced by Kunsthaus Bregenz in collaboration with the Fondazione Prada in Milan and is being shown in Bregenz for the first time. It begins in front of a branch of the US retail chain 7-Eleven, where classical music is played as a deterrent against undesirables, before transitioning to scenes with overpainted graffiti, drug hotspots, museum display cases, snow-covered Scandinavian architecture, and the recurring motif of prohibition signs. “The project focuses on the edges of the urban fabric, where control is most visible. Along the concrete channels of the Los Angeles River, walls serve as boundaries between habitable and uninhabitable space. On these surfaces, graffiti – repeatedly covered by coarse layers of paint applied by municipalities – forms an unintended visual language. Every act of overpainting suppresses expression and simultaneously creates new forms. Erasure thus becomes a form of production, where removal itself leaves traces like a collective fresco.” Cyprien Gaillard

Highlights

• Exhibition by Cyprien Gaillard
• Inflatable sculpture "Visitant" at Kunsthaus Bregenz
• Music from the KILLASAN Soundsystem

General Information

Cyprien Gaillard's exhibition at Kunsthaus Bregenz explores entropy and traces of erosion in urban spaces. Highlights include a construction slide and an inflatable sculpture that interacts with a choreographed performance and music from Berlin's underground scene.

Location

Karl-Tizian-Platz, 6900 Bregenz, Austria

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