C/O BERLIN – May 24 to Sep 16, 2025

JULIAN ROSEFELDT — NOTHING IS ORIGINAL — Exhibition at C/O Berlin, 2025

JULIAN ROSEFELDT — NOTHING IS ORIGINAL

from May 24 to Sep 16, 2025 at C/O BERLIN

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With Nothing is Original, C/O Berlin dedicates a comprehensive exhibition to artist and filmmaker Julian Rosefeldt, presenting for the first time works from a total of thirty years. Through previously unpublished storyboards, sketches, set photo- graphs, and making-of documentation, the exhibition offers a rare glimpse behind the scenes of his image production.

Rosefeldt is one of the leading contemporary artists and filmmakers today. In his elaborately staged film and video installations, he works with museum spaces, the- aters, opera houses, and postindustrial zones, always challenging the mechanisms of image production as well as the construction of narratives and ideologies. His works oscillate between fiction and documentary research, between staging and analysis.

A major theme in his work is the deconstruction of classic film genres and television formats. By breaking down westerns and gangster films, slapstick and science fiction, as well as news broadcasts and soap operas into their basic narrative components, he reveals their structures. In American Night (2008/2009), for ex- ample, he takes up iconic motifs from westerns—from the solitary rider on the prairie to the saloon brawl—and disrupts familiar imagery with unexpected referen- ces to film, politics, and pop culture. This technique of appropriation and citation is combined with a media-archaeological approach, in which Rosefeldt uses archival material and found footage to expose narrative stereotypes, historical myths, and cultural classification systems. He collages and recombines existing images, texts, and cinematic elements to create new layers of meaning. The exhibition title Nothing is Original also refers to this principle: it is taken from Jim Jarmusch’sGolden Rules of Filmmaking, which in turn cites Jean-Luc Godard. As Jarmusch writes, “Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imaginati- on. […] It’s not where you take things from—it’s where you take them to.”

The Soundmaker, 2004 © Julian Rosefeldt, VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2025

The Shift, 2008 © Julian Rosefeldt, VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2025

JULIAN ROSEFELDT — NOTHING IS ORIGINAL — Exhibition at C/O Berlin, 2025

JULIAN ROSEFELDT — NOTHING IS ORIGINAL — Exhibition at C/O Berlin, 2025

American Night, 2008/2009 © Julian Rosefeldt, VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2025

Manifesto (Karl Marx, 1848), 2017 © Julian Rosefeldt, VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2025

DOCUMENTARY IN FLUX . REVISITING THE C/O BERLIN TALENT AWARD

from May 24 to Sep 16, 2025 at C/O BERLIN

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This exhibition showcases fourteen selected artists, offering a new perspective on their work, which demonstrates the broad array of approaches taken to documen- tary work. In this, these works also reflect the societal questions, conversations, and aesthetic of their day. This is why the exhibition has been organized into four thematic sections rather than taking a chronological approach. A selection of winning theorists and artists have taken the exhibition as an opportunity to once again reflect on their aims at the time in thoughts shared as short text contributions.

Janina Wick, Jennifer, 2007, from the series Dreizehn © Janina Wick

DOCUMENTARY IN FLUX — Pepa Hrisotva & Karolina Wojtas — Exhibition at C/O Berlin, 2025

Emanuel Mathias, BB 1986, Abt. 42, 2013, from the work Kunst, Freiheit und Lebensfreude © Photography: Emanuel Mathias/ VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn, 2025

DOCUMENTARY IN FLUX — Willem Popelier — Exhibition at C/O Berlin, 2025

DOCUMENTARY IN FLUX — Pepa Hrisotva — Exhibition at C/O Berlin, 2025

Sasha Kurmaz, Untitled, 2011, Kyiv, Ukraine © Sasha Kurmaz

Pepa Hrisotva, Idjlyal at work, 2006, from the series Strangers in their own country, Bulgaria/Turkey © Pepa Hrisotva

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