Johan Grimonprez. All Memory Is Theft

Press Release

ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe presents a major retrospective of Belgian film and media artist Johan Grimonprez – including his Oscar®-nominated film Soundtrack to a Coup d’État.

Who owns our imagination in a world where existence feels uncertain and truth drifts like a castaway? In the exhibition "All Memory Is Theft" at the ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe, Belgian film and media artist Johan Grimonprez explores this question. His works unfold in a complex journey that interweaves moving images, archival material, objects, and quotes in an intertextual web. In a time when truth and facts must contend with populism and fake news, Grimonprez creates film essays that are both poetic and critically attuned to the media.

Grimonprez works like an archaeologist of the present: assembling fragments from TV news, advertising, cinema, amateur footage, and the internet, he crafts new narratives that challenge our perception of reality. His latest film, Soundtrack to a Coup d’État (2024), co-produced by ZKM for this exhibition, has been nominated for an Oscar® for Best Documentary Film this year.

Press Preview
June 6, 2025, 11 am
Meeting point: ZKM | Foyer
Please register via email: press@zkm.de

Referring to the French philosopher and media theorist Paul Virilio, Grimonprez once noted that every technology inevitably invents its own accident: “When you invent the ship, you also invent the shipwreck; when you invent the plane you also invent the plane crash” His films – at once poetic and deeply political – deconstruct the image-saturated culture of our time, mining archives and reassembling history to analyse how media shape our perceptions.

With "All Memory Is Theft", ZKM | Karlsruhe presents one of the most comprehensive retrospectives of Johan Grimonprez to date, running from June 7, 2025 to February 8, 2026. The exhibition includes film installations, short and feature-length films, vlogs, storyboards, photographs, and drawings. These are woven together with archival materials, quotations, and sketches to form a dense and immersive multi-media landscape through the ZKM’s atriums. Grimonprez interrogates our collective imagination and, through a media archaeology of the present, examines how fear has infected the space of political and social dialogue.

A central work in the exhibition is his most recent documentary Soundtrack to a Coup d’État (2024), which critically examines the assassination of Congolese Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba in the 1960s and the role played by Western colonial powers. The film focuses in particular on jazz – as both a tool of hegemonic power politics and a form of political resistance. It will be screened continuously throughout the exhibition and was nominated for the 2025 Oscar® for Best Documentary Film.

Also featured is Grimonprez’s seminal found-footage film dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y (1997), which explores how airplane hijackings in the 1970s shaped news journalism and public consciousness. This work brought Grimonprez international acclaim when it premiered at documenta X in 1997.

The new exhibition "All Memory Is Theft" invites audiences to reflect on memory, history, and the power of the media. In his award-winning works, Grimonprez repeatedly reveals how the presentation of current events and imagination – of CNN and Hollywood – have become deeply intertwined.