Cyprien Gaillard: When you expect flutes, it's whistles

Cyprien Gaillard’s work moves through cities and their fringes, treating entropy as a creative tool medium: he interprets erosion and accumulation as traces–not merely as signs of loss and decay. His works reject resilience as a framework for interpretation. Rather, they represent life in inhospitable places as something that simply persists–without commentary or judgement. 

A recurring theme in the exhibition at Kunsthaus Bregenz are “deterrents”–measures designed to deter. In fact, public spaces are often shaped and controlled through deliberate interventions. Benches, fences, as well as lighting, sounds, and music are used in ways that welcome some people while keeping others at bay. Those already sidelined by society are thereby pushed even further to the margins. Power operates from behind the scenes, acting preventively and normatively. Gaillard is interested in the intersections of attraction and repulsion. Classical music played in public spaces, for instance, isn’t used to enhance cultural value, but deployed as a deterrent, a means of signaling who is welcome in that space and who is not. What is celebrated as high culture in a concert hall is used here, in Gaillard’s words, as a “soft weapon.”

“Public spaces are no longer places where people come together; instead, they’re increasingly becoming arenas of exclusion.”
Cyprien Gaillard

Displayed on the third floor of Peter Zumthor's iconic building next to Lake of Constance is DETERRENT, 2026, a new work that Gaillard filmed in Los Angeles, as well as in various cities of Northern Europe. It was produced by Kunsthaus Bregenz in collaboration with the Fondazione Prada in Milan and is being shown for the first time in Bregenz. The film begins outside, in front of an American 7-Eleven convenience store where classical music is played loudly as a deterrent to loitering, before it moves onto scenes of whitewashed graffiti, drug-trafficking hotbeds, museum vitrines, the snow-covered architecture of Scandinavia, as well as the persistent motif of regulatory signage.

“The project focuses on the edges of the urban fabric, where control is most clearly visible. Along the concrete canals of the Los Angeles River, walls serve as boundaries between habitable and inhabitable space. The surfaces also become sites for graffiti–repeatedly covered up by thick layers of paint applied by the municipalities–that gives shape to an unintended visual language. Each act of overpainting suppresses expression while at the same time generating new forms. Erasure thus becomes a form of production in which the act of removal itself leaves traces as a collective fresco”
Cyprien Gaillard

Cyprien Gaillard (b. 1980 in Paris) lives in Paris and Berlin. His work has been shown in exhibitions at institutions worldwide, including Haus der Kunst, Munich in 2025–2026, OGR Torino in 2024–2025, the Fondation Beyeler, Basel, in 2024, the Palais de Tokyo & Lafayette Anticipations, Paris, and LUMA Arles, both in 2022, the 58th Venice Biennale in 2019, the Julia Stoschek Collection, Düsseldorf, in 2015, Sprüth Magers, Berlin, in 2015, MoMA PS1, New York, in 2013, the Kunsthalle Basel in 2010, MMK Frankfurt in 2010, the New Museum, New York, and Tate Modern, London, both in 2009. In 2010 Gaillard was the recipient of the Marcel Duchamp Prize, and in 2011 he was awarded the Nationalgalerie Prize for Young Art, Berlin.

KUB 2026.02