With All Memory Is Theft, the ZKM presents a major retrospective of Belgian media artist Johan Grimonprez (*1962), whose work dances on the boundaries of theory and practice, art and cinema, beyond the dualisms of documentary and fiction, other and self, mind and brain, emphasizing a multiplicity of realities.
Who owns our imagination in a world of existential vertigo where truth has become a shipwrecked refugee? Is it not the storyteller who can contain contradictions, and slip between the languages that entangle our worlds, to become a time-traveler of the imagination? Informed by an archaeology of present-day media, Johan Grimonprez’ work depicts intimate stories that brush up against the bigger picture of a global technocracy, calling into question our collective imagination deeply haunted by the omnipresence of Big Tech. No more happy consumers, as digital flaneurs we have become avid consumers of a fear-industry. Paranoia, the new normal, makes it easier to ponder the end of the world, then to imagine political alternatives to transform society in view of today’s challenges.