Thomas Geiger: Temporal Detours

Opening Thursday, March 5, 2026, 6 PM

Temporal Detours moves through temporal digressions, feedback loops, and displacements in which history does not appear as something concluded and visions of the future become fragile.

In the video work Darkness, filmed in the former salt mine of Altaussee, Geiger conducts an imaginary conversation with darkness itself. The site is historically charged: in the final months of the Second World War, the Nazi regime stored more than 6,500 looted artworks here. Darkness becomes a conversational partner and poses fundamental questions: Is it merely an accomplice to the crimes, a passive witness, or does it hold the potential to preserve memory by making absence and void visible? Between present and past, a multilayered dialogue unfolds about concealment, forgetting, and responsibility.

In the adjacent room, a series of monotypes is presented in which Geiger has transferred excerpts of the dialogue with darkness onto paper. Monotype is a printmaking technique in which each impression is unique and the ink is transferred directly onto the paper. Traces of movement, pressure, and gesture thus remain visible. In Geiger’s works, black pigment becomes the carrier of questions and answers that seem to emerge directly from darkness itself.

In the gallery basement, the second video performance 25 Years Too Late is on view. Structured as a guided tour of the former Expo 2000 site in Hanover, Geiger places visitors in a paradoxical temporal position: the point of reference is not the year 2025, but the year 2000. The tour sketches an image of a world on the brink of departure, shaped by digital euphoria and the vision of a sustainable future. Yet the reality on site tells a different story. Abandoned structures, vacant lots, and repurposed buildings characterize the area and stand in stark contrast to the former promise of the future. This deliberate discrepancy between narrative and reality raises new questions: What kind of future do we imagine today? And what are our present-day utopias?

The works come together in Temporal Detours as an investigation of time as a non-linear structure. Geiger employs historical detours, imagined presents, and backward-looking visions of the future to expose the fragility of memory, responsibility, and narratives of progress. Past and future appear not as fixed points, but as unstable systems of reference that continually challenge our present.