Sophie Thun Channels Darkroom Romance in New Switzerland Show
‘Wet Rooms’ is now on view in Lausanne through August 10.
For Vienna-based photographer Sophie Thun, the darkroom is both a laboratory and sanctuary. In Wet Rooms, her latest exhibition at Musée Cantonal des Beaux-Arts, the artist immerses viewers in this personal and alchemical space, bringing her rich analog practice into focus, and with it, a romance of soft red hues and rippling chemical baths.
Toying with ideas of scale and trompe-lœil, Thun sheathes the gallery in collages of photograms and large-format prints, where she overlays her own image onto the spaces she’s inhabited – homes, studios, and galleries. Through this approach, she joins a lineage of women exploring mise-en-abyme – the image within the image – as a strategy of self-reflection and resistance.
Both the creator and subject of the image, Thun disrupts conventional codes of the female nude and pornographic capture. “This assertion is also paired with a form of vanishing,” the museum wrote. “Her body, fragmented, multiplied and rearranged, exists everywhere and nowhere simultaneously.”
Wet Rooms is now on view in Lausanne, Switzerland through August 10.
Musée Cantonal des Beaux-Arts
Pl. de la Gare 16,
1003 Lausanne, Switzerland
