Loretta Fahrenholz’s exhibition A Coin from Thin Air explores human and technological value creation and self-actualization. Loretta’s latest film, Trash The Musical (2023), was produced in collaboration with LA-based performance artist Alicia McDaid. From a distance, Alicia provided Loretta with footage of herself cleaning out her aging uncle’s Philadelphia home while simultaneously producing scandalous, absurdist, and exaggeratedly diaristic performances for social media. With Alicia’s churning production of data paralleled in the piles of analogue material collected by her uncle, including decades’ worth of paintings and self-help books, the film places the virtual and the real in swirling juxtaposition.
Alongside the film, Amant’s 932 Grand gallery hosts an installation of Loretta’s images of picnics made with early text-to-image AI and mushroom-shaped lamps representing decades of replicatory interior design, as well as photographs of German Baroque court society reenactors and architectural scans taken at a psychiatric hospital. Together, this assemblage of overlapping references and layers of artifice traces technology’s often delirious ideological and visceral implications through the realm of a social imaginary.
Image: Loretta Fahrenholz, i need to make mistakes just to learn who I am VII, 2023. Fine Art Print on Hahnemühle Torchon, mounted on AluDiBond, framed. Courtesy the artist; Galerie Buchholz, Berlin/Cologne/New York; and Reena Spaulings, New York/Los Angeles.
Loretta Fahrenholz is a filmmaker and visual artist based in Berlin. Fahrenholz’s work has been shown internationally, including solo exhibitions at Bergen Kunsthall (2023); Kölnischer Kunstverein, Cologne (2022); n.b.k. – Neuer Berliner Kunstverein (2021); mumok – Museum of Modern Art Ludwig Foundation, Vienna (2018); Fridericianum, Kassel (2016); Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (2016), and Kunsthalle Zürich (2015), as well as film screenings at CPH:DOX, Copenhagen (2024), Ann Arbor Film Festival (2019, 2020, 2021), and Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen (2014, 2020), among others.