Nicolas Daubanes

His works reflect on the causes and consequences of violence, social injustice, oppression, and war, as well as skepticism toward authoritarian structures and autocratic regimes. His historical research primarily focuses on phenomena from recent and contemporary French and German history, the Resistance during the Second World War, and the fate of prisoners and deportees.

At the center of his artistic interest lies an exploration of structures of power and strategies of resistance — phenomena that reveal how people in unjust systems attempt to defend themselves and make their voices heard. These processes leave traces in architecture, which Nicolas Daubanes often visualizes in drawings or incorporates into his works as authentic objects. The range of cases he addresses extends from the house arrest imposed on Galileo Galilei by the Holy Office at the Villa Medici in Rome — where Nicolas Daubanes is a fellow in 2024/2025 — to revolutionary artists such as Giovanni Battista Piranesi, Gustave Courbet, and his friend, the poet Pierre Dupont, as well as Jean Moulin, the former head of the French Resistance against National Socialism, and his imprisonment in Montluc Prison in Lyon.

The prison uprising in Nancy — Karlsruhe’s partner city — during the 1970s will also be addressed in the exhibition, alongside the history of the former Charles III prison there and the former IWKA munitions factory in Karlsruhe, which today houses the ZKM.
The exhibition title Le feu intérieur (“The Inner Fire”) refers both to the fires smoldering within societies and to the “inner fire” that drives artists, scientists, politicians, and citizens engaged in resistance. It concerns the courage to disobey, from which ideas for techniques of sabotage, mutiny, and subversion emerge. Daubanes’ art deals with strategies of survival and liberation whose global relevance is undeniable.