Artist Nicolas Daubanes in Karlsruhe: If you saw through the prison bars, iron powder is created

It's been a long time since there were as many people on the streets in Germany as there were in the last few days. Resistance is called for. But what exactly is resistance? And does the visual arts have something to say about this? In recent years, artists have often labeled their work as resistant. The only question is in what sense. Is it about ideals, about political or social questions or about an attitude to life that rebels against the way of the world?

The art of Nicolas Daubanes shows how complex and emotionally charged the term “resistance” is. His thoughts revolve around the phenomenon on various levels: there is the chronicler Daubanes, who remembers uprisings and prisoners of all times and in particular the resistance fighters of the Resistance. There is the worker artist, who breaks with academic art techniques, and the field researcher Daubanes, who is not afraid to visit places of resistance - be they prisons, Nazi memorials or social hotspots.

For 20 years, the Frenchman, born in 1983, has been plowing up the history of his country and reminding us of the toll of freedom. He, who comes from a working-class family, lives in Perpignan in the south of France and doesn't care about the global art scene. His themes drive him. “The Inner Fire” is the name of his current exhibition at the Staatliche Kunsthalle Karlsruhe.

Nicolas Daubanes: “Le fire interior”. Kunsthalle Karlsruhe, Orangery, until January 10, 2027

Daubanes had already attracted attention before. In 2025 he exhibited two huge panoramic formats in the Paris Pantheon. In a place that is actually reserved for famous scientists and artists, they remind us of the nameless resistance fighters against the German occupation.

He recreated these bulky images for Karlsruhe. One thing directly affects German-French relations. “Historical Struthof-Natzweiler Concentration Camp” is reminiscent of the concentration camp located not far from Strasbourg, where resistance fighters from all over Europe were brought together from 1941 onwards to mine pink granite for the expansion of the Führer's residence in Berlin.

But all that can be seen in the pictures is forest, leafless trees, upright and pitiful, black and white barrenness, from which a watchtower peeps out. A shimmering energy emanates from him. It is the result of Daubanes’ material and technique. “I always wanted to do without the classic tools and materials, so I came up with iron filings to depict the prison world,” says Daubanes.

The idea behind this is pulverized, exploded steel. “When a prisoner saws through the prison bars with a file, iron powder is created,” says the artist. He throws the powder or chips onto the magnetized surfaces, where he has previously cut out parts with the cutter that do not attract the iron powder and therefore remain white.

But back to the Struthof-Natzweiler forest. It represents the forgetting of a camp in which, from 1943 onwards, Jewish prisoners were also victims of medical experiments. The forest had obscured the view of the camp, which was located on a mountain, residents later justified their decision to look away. But that is untrue: the forest did not yet exist in the 1940s. The artist transformed repression into a quietly whispering void, which he described in a conversation with curator Kirsten Claudia Voigt as an “emotion of loss, of inner fire.”

There are many such eloquent gaps in his work. Be it the ghostly corridors of the Montluc cell prison in Lyon, inspired by Piranesi's graphics, leading to nowhere, where the head of the Gestapo in Lyon, Klaus Barbie, had the leading head of the Resistance Jean Moulin tortured. Be it the heavy wooden doors of Fontevraud Abbey, which Napoleon once turned into a prison with harsh conditions and into which Daubanes inscribed Goya's nightmares. Or are the works that remember the victims of the Commune of 1871.

It is no coincidence that a Frenchman pursues such a penetrating study of the phenomenon of resistance. The French Revolution determined the nation's self-image despite the growing gap between rich and poor. The student movement began in Paris, and in the 1970s a series of prison riots rocked the country. At that time, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze and Jean-Paul Sartre were committed to reforming the overcrowded French prisons. In 1975, Foucault's “Surveillance and Punishment” was published, which traces the birth of the functional prison.

Daubanes will have read it. While working on a monument to the deportees of the Second World War in Nancy, he discovered fragments of a stone inscription on the main portal of the now demolished Nancy prison. It was called “Maisons d’ârrét, de justice et de correction”, houses of arrest, justice and reform. The artist made six monumental rubbings of the lettering.

One of the frottages hangs vertically on the wall in Karlsruhe. Next to it are the stone blocks borrowed from Nancy, representing the location of the event. Also on display in the exhibition is a large fountain bowl, like the one in front of the Villa Medici in Rome. Daubanes noticed the granite original on a trip; it reminded him of the simple eating utensils in prisons. He had the bowl recreated 1:1 in a company for rehabilitation measures - from the wood of prison doors.

Bars become iron dust, places become monuments, prison doors become works of art – Daubanes’ art celebrates transformation. It links the power of chemical and physical processes with the ideas of freedom and equality. Daubanes himself would probably not say that directly; he would rather talk about his interest in the unfathomable nature of humans.