Caspar Frowein
Upcoming
Anti-Fabel Theme Park
Galerie A.M. 180, Prague, Czech Republic
04.09.2025–04.10.2025
Galerie A.M. 180, Prague, Czech Republic
04.09.2025–04.10.2025
Contact
Biography
Plush and toy electronics; found footage text translated into sound
95 × 45 × 25 cm
Major and Minor Questions is an evolving multimedia installation that uses fables to explore contemporary social and political realities. Within a modular structure, mechanical animals appear as protagonists in different social, political, or psychological scenarios. Drawing on the conventions of the fable, they are assigned distinct traits to reflect contemporary political conditions: powerlessness, relief through role, and authority.
The first configuration, Major and Minor Questions (The Killing of a CEO), integrates text, sound, and documentary material to construct a fragmented narrative. Excerpts from trial records, unofficial documents, and a manifesto attributed to Luigi Mangione are voiced by figures drawn from fable traditions. By the layering of archival content and symbolic imagery, the work tips the balance between evidence, alternative accounts, and subjective reality.
Engraved aluminium printing plates
Each 21 × 29.7 × 2 cm, 3.5 kg (site-specific installation)
Palimpsests explores control and memory – fables of authority and the limits of legibility. CNC-engraved onto aluminum plates, traces accumulate – fragments of previous works, remnants of storylines, newly inscribed lines. The work evolves through a process of layering and reprocessing: residual materials are reintroduced, overwritten, fused with new input in a continuous cycle. Plates may be removed, replaced, or revisited – new ones appear as others vanish. Each becomes a site of ongoing inscription, forming together a dense visual field – part schematic, part narrative.
Plastic; software-generated object proposals
Variable, site-specific dimensions
Like abandoned props from a scenography or figures of a playset, parts rest huddled together, scattered across the floor and over one another. Among the ambiguous forms — oscillating between the amorphous and the familiar — appear what resembles a jug, a shelf, a table, a camera, a chair, a toilet brush, a brick, a bust, and an arrowhead. As if arrested in a state between solid and unstable, their lines have morphed and mutated: Soft yet rugged, the contours are at once organic and artificial, skeletal and abstract. Still, some evoke a sense of functionality, while others remain foreign, an elusive riddle.
Dreaming (of You) is an ongoing installation that changes with each iteration in response to its setting, continuously expanding in new locations. Starting from a collection of digitized physical spaces, the installation interacts with the “collective” knowledge embedded in the environments where it is exhibited and in the training sets of artificial neural networks. Every room has a story. Every dataset, too. Serendipitous connections take place in the processing of data, birthing artifacts, or “hallucinations.” Using this purported nonsensicality, Dreaming (of You) plays with how spaces and their objects are coded, offering glimpses into the sea of data that neural networks navigate as well as ways of recoding in a continuous transference between the physical and the digital.
Text by Caroline Ballegaard
Frowein graduated with a Master’s degree from the University of the Arts Berlin in 2024. Recent exhibitions include 2322 (Berlin, 2025), Vorspiel transmediale × CTM (Berlin, 2024), and the Einstein Center Digital Future at the Goethe-Institut (Berlin, 2024).