VERKÜMMERT: MAREK WOLFRYD

Verkümmert presents Marek Wolfryd’s installation Content Creation in the Age of Globalized Reproduction, in which 312 black mylar balloon-letters assemble into a passage from Walter Benjamin’s 1935 essay 'The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction': 

“Was im Zeitalter der technischen Reproduzierbarkeit des Kunstwerks verkümmert, das ist seine Aura. Die Reproduktionstechnik löst das Reproduzierte aus dem Bereich der Tradition ab. Indem sie die Reproduktion vervielfältigt, setzt sie an die Stelle seines einmaligen Vorkommens das massenhafte. Diese Prozesse führen zu einer gewaltigen Erschütterung des Tradierten.”
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“What withers in the age of the technical reproducibility of the work of art is its aura. The technology of reproduction detaches the reproduced object from the sphere of tradition. By multiplying the reproduction, it substitutes a mass occurrence for a unique existence. These processes lead to a profound shaking of what has been handed down.”

Here, Benjamin’s language is not only cited but embodied. Each balloon is a unit of breath and volume, a temporary container for meaning. Together they form the withering of aura; individually they are fragile, mass-produced glyphs, slipping between celebration, emptiness, and decay. When the 312 black balloon-letters are laid out in sequence, they form Benjamin’s sentence, every letter in its assigned place. Here, the letters have been stripped of order and grammar, sliding into a dense heap in the corner. What once functioned as text now reads as volume, before entering the slow collapse that the passage itself describes.

The title 'Verkümmert', Benjamin’s term for aura’s condition under mechanical reproduction, does not describe disappearance but atrophy. Aura remains, but in a reduced, wrinkled state, like a balloon that never quite bursts, only sinks. Wolfryd’s installation stages this condition materially: the quote is there, yet no longer readable; what survives is a residue of form and a memory of content. Like the dynamics of power, where spreading out dilutes and consolidating compresses, meaning is suspended between excess and collapse. After the installation’s demise, the pierced or deflated letters will be compressed into a single black cube, a dense relic of exhaustion: aura reduced to material residue, reproduction returned to matter.

In Verkümmert, Wolfryd reanimates Benjamin’s critique in the globalized present, revealing how content circulates, mutates, and decays, how even ideas, when reproduced endlessly, begin to wither from within.