The artist’s first major solo exhibition in Germany brings together drawings, photograms and installations exploring power, injustice and forms of resistance.
The Staatliche Kunsthalle Karlsruhe presents Le feu intérieur, Nicolas Daubanes’ first major solo exhibition in Germany. The exhibition, installed in the Kunsthalle’s Orangerie, can be visited from 26 September 2026 to 10 January 2027.
Through large-scale wall drawings, photograms and installations, Daubanes explores structures of power and forms of resistance against them. His practice draws on historical research to address issues including violence, oppression, social injustice, imprisonment and memory.
For his works, the artist uses materials directly connected to the places and events he investigates. Iron and steel filings, for example, appear in his installations as a reference to the act of filing through prison bars. He also incorporates objects from former prisons, including cell doors, which he transforms and makes part of his installations.
The exhibition establishes connections between different historical moments. Among other episodes and figures, Daubanes addresses Galileo Galilei’s house arrest at the Villa Medici, the work of Giovanni Battista Piranesi, Gustave Courbet and Jean Moulin, as well as the history of the French Resistance, concentration camps during the Nazi period and the 1972 prisoners’ uprising in Nancy.
Among the works presented in Karlsruhe is L’Hallali (2023), made using twelve original cell doors. The arrangement of the doors refers to a historical photograph from 1871 showing twelve bodies of members of the Paris Commune placed in their coffins.
The title of the exhibition, Le feu intérieur — “the inner fire” — refers both to the tensions running through societies and to the inner force that drives people to resist. In Karlsruhe, Daubanes has also completed some of his works directly in the Orangerie’s galleries during the installation of the exhibition.
The exhibition continues an investigation that the artist has developed through different projects and exhibitions, situating his work in relation to spaces and historical episodes in which architecture becomes a testimony to situations of violence, confinement and resistance.