08.03.–18.05.2025
Opening: 07.03.2025, 18h
Some fragments are meticulously preserved, while others are left to disappear. Certain stories are upheld, while others fade away. Through the excavation and recontextualization of micro-narratives, Julian Irlinger’s practice questions the mechanisms of memory and the transmission of history. Drawing on archives, ready-made objects and historical aesthetics, his body of work—spanning drawing, film, photography, and sculpture—challenges dominant historical narratives and their cultural representations, as well as the ideological currents that shape them.
For The Curtain of Time, Irlinger presents a newly commissioned film within a spatial installation reminiscent of an office cubicle in the main gallery of Portikus. Following the length of traditional animation shorts that used to precede feature films in theaters, the artist’s video draws on mid-century animation aesthetics. Adopting the technique of cel-animation, in which drawings are inked and painted onto transparent celluloid sheets, photographed frame by frame, and compiled into sequences to create the illusion of movement on screen, the work takes inspiration from the visual language of the acclaimed studios of UPA (United Productions of America) and the Zagreb School of Animated Film. Characterized by a radical economy of form—simplified geometric shapes, flat color fields, an abstract spatial approach, and repetitive movements—their animation styles rejected the meticulous realism and animism of contemporaries like Walt Disney. Instead, limited animation artists redefined the medium by incorporating influences from Bauhaus, Cubism, Expressionism and Surrealism. Though widely celebrated for their experimental approach, these studios also operated within ideological and propagandistic frameworks, producing films that served not only as entertainment but also as instruments of politics, industry, and the military.
If the history of cinema is closely intertwined with political interests, the same applies to urban planning. Every city’s design is shaped by decisions—from the layout of streets and the spaces allocated to cars to which architecture defines the landscape. Spanning 11 minutes, in The Curtain of Time (2025), Irlinger takes us on a journey through a day in an architecture firm, which unfolds in a single continuous shot: a telephone rings, but nobody picks it up as the staff is asleep, napping on their desks or sleepwalking.
With little action driven by the protagonists, it is the interior that speaks volumes: a coat hanger evokes the playful lines of Joan Miró’s works, while a speckled paravent alludes to Jackson Pollock’s abstract expressionism. These subtle references nod to both artists’ entanglement with 20th-century politics: one marked by the oppression under Franco’s dictatorship, the other instrumentalized in a covert CIA propaganda program that promoted American modern art as a symbol of freedom of expression against the rigid, state-controlled socialist realism of the Soviet Union during the Cold War. Elsewhere in Irlinger’s film, models of iconic modernist buildings, such as Frank Lloyd Wright’s Guggenheim and Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoye, are thrown into a trash bin. The architects’ drawing boards are instead now covered with blueprints of half-timbered houses, their traditional design gesturing toward a renewed fascination in Germany for reconstruction architecture. Rooted in vernacular tradition, they suggest a retreat from modernist ideals, reflecting a broader cultural shift in recent decades.
The socio-political stakes of rebuilding historical buildings lost in World War II form the conceptual framework of Irlinger’s film. While some view this architectural movement as a means of preserving national identity, others consider it a nostalgic and revisionist approach to the past that seeks to cover up the fractures and scars of history. Caught between the pursuit of future paradigms and the pull of an idealized, reconstructed past, the vision of the urban planners in The Curtain of Time resonates with the architecture of Portikus—a modern interpretation of a traditional timber house with a gabled roof stretched to monumental proportions—and the city of Frankfurt, whose old town has been restored. First rebuilt from the rubble in the post-war period, Frankfurt’s historic center was more recently transformed through the Dom-Römer project (2012–2018), which partially recreated its lost medieval cityscape by blending historical reconstructions with contemporary architecture.
In one key scene of Irlinger’s animation, an architect, finally awake, lies on the couch of a psychoanalyst. Yet their voice remains unheard, leaving us to question who the therapy session belongs to—the individual subject or the collective—attempting to reconcile with their history through the structures that are being rebuilt. The looping format of the artist’s film reinforces the feeling of history trapped in repetition—an endless cycle of destruction and reconstruction that is not only remembered but constantly re-enacted. Just as the architects remain asleep at their desks, the weight of history lingers in this limbo, where the commodification of memory and the formation of national identity inform not only urban landscapes but also the collective unconscious.
Weary of the ongoing tension between generational perspectives on the culture of memory, the planners in The Curtain of Time sleepwalk out of Portikus. No longer confined to the screen, Irlinger’s animation extends to the street lanterns of the Old Bridge, on which the silhouettes of the architecture firm’s staff are printed on banners. As the real movement of passing cars and pedestrians brings them to life, the boundary between fiction and reality blurs, leaving us to wonder what awaits us when we awake from our deep sleep: which history is truly being commemorated, and which one is being rewritten?
Julian Irlinger (b. 1986 in Erlangen, Germany) is an artist based in Berlin. Recent solo exhibitions include the Wende Museum, Los Angeles (2022), Galerie Wedding, Berlin (2020), Wilhelm-Hack-Museum, Ludwigshafen (2019), and Kunsthalle Darmstadt (2017). His work has also been featured in exhibitions at Hamburger Kunstverein (2023), Dortmunder Kunstverein (2022), Kunsthalle Baden-Baden (2018), Artists Space, New York (2018), and Kunsthalle Wien (2016). Irlinger graduated from the Städelschule in Frankfurt am Main in 2017, and was a participant of the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program 2017/18 in New York. From 12 April, 2025, until 8 June, 2025, Irlinger will have a solo exhibition at Kunstverein Schwerin.
Curated by Liberty Adrien & Carina Bukuts
The Curtain of Time is made possible by major support from the Dr. Marschner Stiftung.
Poster design: veryes (Berlin)
