All Memory Is Theft
Johan Grimonprez retrospective
at ZKM | Zentrum für Kunst und Medien Karlsruhe (Germany)
Opening Friday, 6 June 2025, 19:00
7 June 2025 – 8 February 2026
Kristof De Clercq gallery is delighted to share the news of a major retrospective of gallery artist Johan Grimonprez (°1962, Belgium) at ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe. Titled All Memory Is Theft, the exhibition offers a comprehensive overview of Grimonprez’s influential body of work, which explores the shifting boundaries between theory and practice, art and cinema—moving beyond the dualisms of documentary and fiction, self and other, mind and brain—to emphasize 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.
“There is a mourning for a lost future,” writes the author and activist Max Haiven in his book Crisis of Imagination. Crisis of Power (2014), “not for what was but for what could be.” In Grimonprez’ works, history and memory not merely function as a means to recall the past, but rather as a tool to negotiate the present in order to reshape a shared future. Memory, after all, is a form of collective storytelling; the contested site of ideological struggle, where we redeem our forgotten dreams. As writer James Baldwin once remarked, “history is not the past, it is the present. We carry our history with us, we are our history.” In Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland (1865), the Queen confronts Alice with a similar idea: “it’s a poor sort of memory that only works backwards.”
See: https://zkm.de/en/2025/06/johan-grimonprez-all-memory-is-theft
Curators: Daniel Pies, Philipp Ziegler
Project producer and editor for zap-o-matik: Pedro Gossler
Project assistance: Yuliana Mosheeva
Scenography: Matthias Gommel
Technical project management: Felix Pausch
Supply of historical TV sets: Colorvac
Registrar: Regina Linder
Graphic design: 2xGoldstein
Vlogs made possible by the Arts Research Fund of the University College Ghent (KASK), HOGent
With the support of the Flemish Community Art Fund.
Special thanks to: the artist; Galerie Anita Beckers, Frankfurt/Main; Kristof De Clercq gallery, Ghent; and Sean Kelly Gallery, New York, as well as the entire ZKM team
