In her “chambres,” “interiors,” “dioramas,” “planets,” and “panoramas,” Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster explores the narrative potential of space and its ability to stage fictional scenarios and speculative encounters. Often citing from literature and cinema, her environments make various characters appear, some imagined, others real, and still others performed and embodied by the artist herself. In her work, the biographical doesn’t seem to rest within the limitations of physical space and time but rather takes on various guises, in an ever-expanding and shifting way. Her large-scale panorama installations of recent years (as presented at Pinacoteca Agnelli, Turin (2023); Albarrán Bourdais, Madrid (2023); Serpentine Galleries, London (2022); Esther Schipper, Berlin (2022); or Secession, Vienna (2021), amongst others) use means of collage to build a personal cosmos of connectedness, kinship and solidarity between artists, activists, and philosophers bridging several centuries. In the panoramic installation Farmacias Distantes (2023), currently on view at the Kunstverein, a pharmacy becomes a space of encounter between characters such as Madge Gill, Vivian Maier, Anaïs Nin, Fernand Khnopff, Emma Kunz, Hermann Rorschach, the character Hari from Tarkovsky’s Solaris (1972), Enrique Vila-Matas, the artist’s daughter and brother, or the artist herself as Brian Sweeney Fitzgerald in Werner Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo (1982).

The conversation will touch upon the notion of the biographical and its meaning and appearance in Gonzalez-Foerster’s work, as well as upon her long-term practice of narrativizing and scripting space, among other things. It will be held in English.