Strausberger Platz 15 & 19, 10243 Berlin
Julian Rosefeldt
GONE ASTRAY
Euphoria, 2025 ©Julian Rosefeldt and VG Bild-Kunst
Opening in parallel to the 76th edition of the Berlinale, German artist and filmmaker Julian Rosefeldt’s solo exhibition GONE ASTRAY invites audiences to reflect on the mechanics of filmmaking beyond mainstream cinema. The exhibition further coincides with Coproduction Office’s acquisition of the international sales rights for Euphoria (2025), Rosefeldt’s latest feature film starring Giancarlo Esposito and with the voice of Cate Blanchett – an excerpt of which appears in the show. In the scene on display, viewers are lured in through the anthropomorphic monologue of a tiger, voiced by Blanchett, as it prowls endless aisles of lookalike goods in a lifeless supermarket, cynically laying bare hollow human greed and the self-destructive rituals of consumption.
Based in Paris and Berlin, Coproduction Office is an international distributor and producer of award-winning films, including two Palme d’Or recipients: Triangle of Sadness (2022) and The Square (2017), both by Ruben Östlund. In 2024, founder Philippe Bober opened a Berlin exhibition space with the aim of uniting cinema and contemporary art – the exact intersection that Rosefeldt’s work occupies. Following Euphoria’s world premiere at the 49th Gothenburg Film Festival, Coproduction Office will present the film to buyers at the European Film Market (EFM) in conjunction with the Berlinale, 12–18th February 2026.
As both an artist and filmmaker, Julian Rosefeldt’s work quietly but powerfully exposes cinematic conventions as allegories for individual and collective behaviour. In GONE ASTRAY, this motif unveils across five works, brought together for the first time: Trilogy of Failure (2004–2005), Detonation Deutschland (1996), Meine Kunst kriegt hier zu fressen – Hommage à Max Beckmann (2002), Deep Gold (2013/2014) and an excerpt of Euphoria (2025).
Spanning Galerie Philippe Bober’s two neighbouring exhibition venues, the theatrical mise en scène of GONE ASTRAY unfolds across both the white-cube spaces and the raw backstage areas, where exposed cables and leftover props quietly linger. For Rosefeldt, cinema is not just a tool for storytelling; it’s also a complex apparatus, a myth-making machine. By uncovering and deconstructing the mechanisms of film – from montage and genres to behind-the-scenes sets and sound production – he lays bare the hidden frameworks that shape our sense of reality.
Works such as Trilogy of Failure – comprising The Soundmaker (2004), Stunned Man (2004) and The Perfectionist (2005) – reveal our claustrophobic entanglement with daily rituals through each protagonist’s descent into permanent Sisyphean activity. These ceaseless cycles of attempt and failure render our obligation to society’s invisible rules and norms perceptible, whilst the references to cinematic apparatuses – the film set, Foley artist, stunt performer – frame the labour of performance, revealing the processes that govern both cinema and everyday behaviour.
Detonation Deutschland (1996) turns to the ongoing evolution of Germany’s post-war collective memory. The term Vergangenheitsbewältigung holds a particular position in the German language, capturing the nation’s ongoing reckoning with its past, and the built environment emerges as one of many active participants shaping and reshaping that memory. Created with Rosefeldt’s former artistic partner, Piero Steinle, Detonation Deutschland presents post-war architectural demolitions in Germany using archival footage. Shown as excerpts from the original seven-channel film installation, the work collapses different decades into a collage of cinematic present, exposing the tensions at the heart of collective memory production as non-linear, fragmented and unstable.
Detonation Deutschland’s display at Galerie Philippe Bober, located on Strausberger Platz along Karl-Marx-Allee (formerly Stalinallee 1949–1961), adds another dimension as the site itself embodies multiple historical layers. Heavily destroyed by Allied bombings during WWII, reconstruction began in the early 1950s under the GDR with monumental Zuckerbäckerstil buildings projecting the Soviet ideology of socialist realism. Following de-Stalinisation, the boulevard was renamed and lavish ornamentation fell out of favour. This further change in ideology marked the shift towards the construction of prefabricated Plattenbauten in adjacent areas of Karl-Marx-Allee, an architectural style featured in Detonation Deutschland. Today, Strausberger Platz remains flanked by grand examples of early GDR ideals, while further along Karl-Marx-Allee, several of the later Plattenbauten endure. What is preserved and what is forgotten? Detonation Deutschland’s scenes of destruction become hauntingly fascinating symbols of shifting and disappearing political systems, ideologies and social orders – an endless cycle of erasure and loss in the search for something allegedly better.
The exploration of human behaviour under the weight of history and ideology finds a parallel in Meine Kunst kriegt hier zu fressen – Hommage à Max Beckmann (2002). Once again Rosefeldt and former collaborator Steinle weave together archival footage through associative montage, this time by focusing on the historical circumstances that shaped the life and work of German artist Max Beckmann. A melange of emblematic scenes mixes Beckmann’s wartime anxieties with the roaring twenties and the ominous ascent of National Socialism.
Lastly, the black-and-white film Deep Gold (2005) reinterprets a pivotal scene from Luis Buñuel’s surrealist classic L’Âge d’Or (1930), unravelling themes of desire, power and social constraints. True to Rosefeldt’s style, the film is hyper-staged, turning the machinery of cinema into both its subject and its tool. What unfolds is an absurd exaggeration and deconstruction of classic cinematic tropes, transforming lust and spectacle into a critical reflection of systems of control and cinema’s myth-making power. References to Buñuel’s legacy are periodically injected with contemporary nods: Richard Wagner’s music and a Dalí doppelgänger cross paths with topless FEMEN activists and Occupy Wall Street slogans, drawing parallels between the past and present.
One hundred years on from Buñuel and Beckmann’s time and we’re facing similar scenarios. Through both content and the mechanisms of cinema, Rosefeldt’s works subtly highlight recurring patterns that reverberate in the present: the trap of mundane routines, attempts to erase and rewrite collective memory, a lingering financial crisis and the dangerous and looming rise of fascism. These political undercurrents are often masked by the absurdist register that his films carry. We find ourselves confronted with nonsensical aspects of human behaviour and things that appear uncannily familiar, yet we cannot instantly pinpoint. Rosefeldt’s compositions toy with our expectations, luring us into a comfortable rhythm until a form of displaced déjà vu sharpens our perception. As the exhibition title suggests, perhaps we’re being misled, we’re on a detour. Maybe this time we should pay attention, for, as Karl Marx warns us via Blanchett’s tiger: “History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce.”
Text by Ellen Lapper
The exhibition design was realised in collaboration with Peter Klare and Alexander Wolf
Stunned Man – Trilogy of Failure (II), 2004 ©Julian Rosefeldt and VG Bild-Kunst