Matthias Gubler – fffound

blackprint gallery

Matthias Gubler

fffound

25.09.–30.10.2025

Finissage with a performance

by Tim Shaw “Points of Failure”

fffound presented twenty works developed by Matthias Gubler (*1981, Zurich) specifically for his solo exhibition at blackprint gallery — the first presentation of the series in this form. Each work is a looped video animation of an everyday object: 21 seconds, playing continuously, on a monitor housed within a hand-built cardboard frame or mounted on a cardboard plinth. The series has a prior version: a 2023 iteration in which monitors were arranged on an open skeletal rack structure, inviting viewers to browse through their contents. The 2025 version reverses this logic. Each screen becomes a distinct object in the room, held at a fixed position within its cardboard armature, its loop running without variation.

The cardboard is not incidental to the work. It is the same material in which commodities arrive: the infrastructure of global circulation reused as display. Packaging becomes plinth; what is ordinarily discarded becomes what frames the image. The monitors — ranging from seven-inch to forty-seven-inch screens depending on the work — play a single animation on repeat, enforcing duration where a feed would offer accumulation. The objects animated are industrial or domestic in origin, many associated with periods of production now considered obsolete. Through repetition and isolation, each takes on a fixed, prolonged presence it does not ordinarily hold.

The works were produced at 2160×3840 pixel resolution, in HEVC/H.265 format, each loop running 21 seconds. All works are unique editions of 1 + 1AP.

The exhibition text was written by Daniel Blochwitz, who situates fffound within a lineage of video and new media practices — from Harun Farocki to Hito Steyerl and Tacita Dean — in which the use of found material carries political weight. Blochwitz identifies the cardboard pedestal as an “analogue armature supporting a digital animation of an analogue fragment,” and the loops as pointing back to pre-cinematic devices — the zoetrope, the phenakistiscope — repurposed to decelerate rather than accelerate the pace of image-encounter.

The full text is available in the invitation post for this exhibition.

Finissage — Points of Failure, Tim Shaw
Thursday, 30 October 2025 — Bar Mau, Zürich

The exhibition closed with a performance of Points of Failure by Tim Shaw, held outside Bar Mau — a few steps from blackprint gallery — on the evening of October 30, 2025. Points of Failure is an ongoing series of audiovisual performances in which Shaw works exclusively with live processes: DIY electronics, repurposed audio equipment, and found objects whose acoustic and electrical properties he mobilises in direct response to the architecture and conditions of the performance space.

The work runs for approximately 30 minutes and operates without pre-recorded material, without screens, without loops, without effects processing. Horn speakers, hydrophones, electromagnetic coils, transducers, spark gaps, and self-made instruments have featured across different iterations of the series; the specific configuration of each performance is determined by the site and the materials at hand. Shaw has described the series as structured through failure and materiality.

Points of Failure has been performed at venues including Café OTO London, Les Instants Chavirés Paris, LUFF Lausanne, Cave12 Geneva, and the Museum of Modern Art Rio de Janeiro, among others.

Works © Matthias Gubler

Photography & Performance documentation © blackprint gallery, 2025