Karlsruhe State Art Gallery | Nicolas Daubanes and the window on the class struggle

Nicolas Daubanes, Former Natzweiler-Struthof Concentration Camp, 2025, Karlsruhe State Art Gallery Photo: Photo: Felix Grünschloss The small Baden city of Karlsruhe is suitable for legal tourism like no other in Germany. Friends of jurisprudence can admire the Federal Court of Justice, pay homage to the Federal Public Prosecutor's Office (there is also a Buback memorial stone) and enjoy the Federal Constitutional Court. Located in the castle park, the latter BRD institution is only a few minutes away from the Orangery of the Karlsruhe State Art Gallery. It will host an exhibition called “Le feu intérieur” by the artist Nicolas Daubanes until January 2027.

In his work, the Frenchman questions the ideal world of law-abiding. He shows how capitalist, fascist, clerical rule gets rid of its opponents by locking up troublemakers using criminal law, in correctional facilities and in concentration camps. Daubanes sees himself as a political artist. His parents were workers and died from the pollutants they had to breathe in over decades. The son vowed never to work for anyone else - so art was left to him.

The fact that the certainly not proletarian authorities in the cultural world had chosen the man, who was born in Marseille in 1983, for a scholarship at the Villa Medici in Florence when he was in his early 30s, among other things, and granted him an exhibition in the Pantheon in Paris last year, should be mentioned, but it should not cloud the view of Daubanes' work. Expensive computer animations or nerdy AI antics are not his thing. One of his favorite materials was iron filings: the dark, powdery residue that prisoners "make" that sticks to their hands as they laboriously try to file at the bars of their cells.

Nicolas Daubanes questions the ideal world of law-abiding.

Daubanes collects them in buckets and throws the rubble onto magnetic plates, where the chips then stick. The artist does not limit himself to this process; he draws on glass with burning sparks and creates large-format photograms. Physical work is always required. He's all about resistance, something he repeats almost mantrically in a short video documentary. One could perhaps add that he requires resistant materials to create images. The majority of these have as their motif places of resistance or show places where this was suppressed.

Daubanes avoids depicting the fighters, perpetrators and victims. Any voyeurism is avoided; the audience is encouraged to search for the battlefields of their time themselves. We share Galileo Galilei's view of the starry sky behind bars that he saw when he was under house arrest. The astronomer was imprisoned in the Villa Medici in the 17th century because of his church-incompatible views on astronomy (keyword: institutional criticism!). We see prison ships on which British people were taken to the penal colony of Australia for petty crimes in the 18th century.

In the middle of the orangery there are six wooden cell doors, on which there are six more. It is one of several works by Daubanes that deal with the Paris Commune. We remember: The Commune was proclaimed during the Franco-Prussian War of 1870/71, with which Bismarck, among other things, motivated Baden to incorporate into the German Empire.

This sextet is called “L’Halali” and alludes to a famous painting (“The Hunting Call”) by the painter and Communard Gustave Courbet, but also refers to a photograph that shows twelve killed Communards. The abstract monochrome of the doors is counteracted by figurative carvings; Scribbles refer to the outbreak: the inner fire (“feu intérieur”) resists the “inner regimentation”. Daubanes uses sabotage, mixing - as prisoners of war did - material-decomposing sugar into concrete that is supposed to be impenetrable.

Nicolas Daubanes, L’Hallali 2023, exhibition view Staatliche Kunsthalle Karlsruhe Photo: Photo: Felix Grünschloss German history of the 20th century plays an important role in Daubanes’ work. It shows the prison in Lyon, where Gestapo chief Klaus Barbie murdered and tortured during World War II, but who "had nothing to say" about his crimes when he was late convicted in Bolivia.

With his iron filings, Daubanes allows meters of trees and bushes to grow on the other side of the orangery - the notorious German forest subsequently becomes a privacy screen: it didn't exist over 80 years ago, when innocent citizens had a clear view of the Natzweiler-Struthof concentration camp in occupied Alsace. Of course, no one later wanted to know about this place where thousands of people were murdered. A forest has now sprung up around the camp and Daubanes has photographed it.

Confirmed photographed history of crime and resistance, the excavation material of iron filings, image editing, historical and historical views and glances - Daubanes achieves a special amalgamation in his exhibition and with his works. And the inner fire that means life, which the henchmen of peace, order and death want to extinguish, continues to blaze in the French artist's work.

In weeks when culture-loving conservatives and propertied left-wing liberals approve of "tough action" in France when those excluded from all the advantages of society are to be locked up because, for example, they do not accept the magical limit of a shop window, Daubanes' "Le feu intérieur" is the exhibition of the hour.

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