1 night in Paris
2024
laser-engraving on marble, screenshots, server rack
89 x 63 x 30 cm 

"1 night in Paris" (2024) is part of a trilogy of sculptures in which Rosanna Marie Pondorf explores celebrity sex tapes and their social impact in a system shaped by capitalism. The artist combines a server rack with a laser-cut marble slab engraved with screenshots of online articles and Instagram profiles, all referencing Paris Hilton's viral 2004 amateur porn video. Pondorf is interested in the interaction of money, media, and sex, and the sculpture reflects on the consequences of privately recorded pornography. The leaked video caused a scandal and had a significant impact on Hilton's fame, as it was professionally marketed and grossed over $10 million. The celebrity's subsequent rise in popularity shows how the media and financial connection of bodies manifests itself in the modern digital world. In "1 night in Paris", the combination of server racks, which can be read as the memory bodies of our digital bodies, and marble, a material with a long art historical tradition, brings together different time horizons and points to the long-term effects on capitalist and social structures of even seemingly insignificant content on the Internet. Pondorf shows how deeply pop phenomena function and how bodies are medially and financially interconnected by transferring the fleeting image flows of Internet data into haptic material and thus immortalizing them. [Maxine Weiss]

[photo] Dirk Tacke