With 3 “Easycollage” and 6 “Collage-Truth”, Thomas Hirschhorn transforms the MAN Museum’s project room into an uncomfortable space full of provocative suggestion and visual contrasts. The project, curated by Lorenzo Giusti, proposes a series of large-scale works and other smaller ones, created between 2012 and 2015, in which fashion photographs live side by side with war photos. 

The sense of estrangement and repulsion triggered by the vision of the collages is the weapon with which Hirschhorn carries on his battle against a simplified relationship with the image and against the tendency of mass media photography to concentrate only on partial aspects of reality, which is what photography claims to capture, by removing the shades of meaning. 

The imposition on the eye of bodies torn apart by war and at the same time of bodies idealized by advertising and marketing, parallels in appearance contrary to all logic of sense and aesthetics, represents a mindful strategy that aims to invert the process of assuefaction/hypersensitivation induced by the media. 

Thomas Hirschhorn's works intend to create awareness among viewers of their visual experiences, to come to grips with their sensitivity and recognize the need for careful critical thought when dealing with the world of the media and, more in general, with geopolitical realities and social conditions today. 

The 3 “Easycollage” and 6 “Collage-Truth”project develops along the pathway of an investigation of the collage as an instrument of critical analysis traced by Hirschhorn in recent years. His is an investigation in which the artist places side-by-side site-specific works that respond to the precise design of critically analyzing society (atmospheres created for the most part with poor materials and objects of daily use) and participatory operations that call for direct involvement of the public, as in the case of his “Presence and Production” projects such as “Deleuze Monument” (Avignon, 2000), “Bataille Monument” (Kassel, 2002), “24h Foucault” (Paris, 2004), “The Bijlmer Spinoza-Festival” (Amsterdam, 2009), “Gramsci Monument” (New York, 2013) and “Flamme éternelle” (Paris, 2014). 

Thomas Hirschhorn (Bern, 1957) studied at the Schule für Gestaltung (Zürich) and moved to Paris in 1983, where he has been living since. His work has been shown in numerous museums, galleries and exhibitions among which the Venice Biennale (1999 and 2015), Documenta11 (2002), 27th Sao Paolo Biennale (2006), the 55th Carnegie International, Pittsburg (2008), the Swiss Pavillion at the 54th Venice Biennale (2011), La Triennale at Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2012), the 9th Shanghai Biennale (2012), Gladstone Gallery New York (2012), Manifesta 10 in Saint-Petersburg (2014). A selection of his writings was published by MIT Press (October Books): Critical Laboratory: The Writings of Thomas Hirschhorn. In 2015 the book Gramsci Monument was published by Dia Foundation and Koenig Books. In 2013 Thomas Hirschhorn presented the "Gramsci Monument" in the Bronx, New York. “Flamme éternelle”, his most recent “Presence and Production” project, took place at Palais de Tokyo (Paris) in 2014. Thomas Hirschhorn has received different awards and prizes, among which : “Preis für Junge Schweizer Kunst” (1999), “Prix Marcel Duchamp” (2000), "Rolandpreis für Kunst im öffentlichen Raum" (2003), “Joseph Beuys-Preis” (2004) and the “Kurt Schwitters-Preis” (2011).