Presented at La Filature, Scène Nationale de Mulhouse, and featuring over three hundred photographs taken between 1972 and 2024 in his native region of southern Styria in Austria, Schöne Welt, wo bist du?(Laughing world,where are you) is the first major monographic exhibition of Manfred Willmann‘s work in France. The exhibition at La Filature presents the main series that made the artist famous – Schwarz und Gold, Die Welt ist schön and Das Land, which are at the center of a cycle on nature begun over forty years ago – alongside works that are among the first rare conceptual works in Austria and that outline Willmann’s profound questioning of the photographic medium.
Schöne Welt, wo bist du? In a troubled world, subject to social, political and environmental upheavals that plunge it into profound uncertainty, when some still seek to close borders and shrink imaginations, this verse by the German poet Friedrich von Schiller (Laughing world, where are you? in English) imposes itself as a duty to replace the title of one of Manfred Willmann’s emblematic series, Die schöne Welt (The world is beautiful) and its affirmative form not so much to deplore the state of the world as to invite us to reconsider our capacity to restore reconciliation in the reality of our lives.
For over fifty years, Manfred Willmann has explored photography that addresses the complexities of the contemporary world and visual culture in the age of globalization. The photographer meticulously records our existence, our attempt at otherness that sometimes encounters our resistance, our tragic sense of life that lies hidden in the smallest forms of our reality. His large-scale ensembles not only show raw details of everyday life, but also speak of the photographic medium and its own possibilities for representing the world in its beauty, ugliness, and transience.
Manfred Willmann : Schöne Welt, wo bist du?
April 5 – June 1, 2025
La Filature, Scène Nationale de Mulhouse
20 All. Nathan Katz
68090 Mulhouse, France
www.lafilature.org
