Curated by Daniel Birnbaum & Jacqui Davies.
Over the years, through its repeated appearances in film, hacker culture, gaming, and digital finance, the name TRON has accumulated a notable cultural and aesthetic charge. The exhibition TRON at the Michel Majerus Estate presents ten works from Michel Majerus’s distinctive eponymous series (1999), marking the first large-scale presentation since they debuted in the exhibition as soon as possible at Gió Marconi Gallery in Milan nearly three decades ago. A collaborative project by Daniel Birnbaum and Jacqui Davies, the exhibition TRON constructs a speculative environment in which cinematic interventions become a framework for a layered reading of Michel Majerus’s work.
Two video collages by Jacqui Davies introduce a moving image dimension that extends and complicates the visual field, reinforced by a reflective wall. The artist’s former studio is transformed into a spatial index of the network of references underlying the Tron works.
The large monochrome color fields of the Tron works are painted directly onto the wall in bright hues drawn from the Pantone palette. In the upper right corner of each, a silkscreen print is mounted, juxtaposing a promotional image from the Disney film TRON (1982) with a cropped portrait of the Berlin hacker Boris Floricic, who used the pseudonym TRON. The sequential numbering in the titles of the works, the Pantone color codes and the serially produced screen prints evoke technical manufacturing processes that, in combination with the abstract color fields, challenge the conventional notion of painting. At the same time, the motifs evoke tech subcultures, cinematic imagination, digital gaming worlds, and their grounding in reality. The serial conception and the spatially expansive installation generate a dense field of tension in which references circulate as a distinct and processual material.
Majerus’s artistic practice has long been a point of inquiry for Daniel Birnbaum: From his early review of Majerus’s exhibition Space Safari (1997) at Anders Tornberg Gallery in Stockholm, to their 2002 collaboration on Sozialpalast, the site-specific installation that temporarily covered Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate with the image of Schöneberg’s Pallasseum housing complex, Birnbaum situated Majerus’s practice within the “expanded field” of painting, where it operates simultaneously as painting, installation, sculpture, and architecture.
The exhibition TRON highlights moving image, gaming, and digital systems as further integral aspects of Majerus’s artistic logic. TRON offers a multidimensional experience which opens the artist’s practice to new dialogues, presenting the works as points of convergence for cultural, temporal, visual, theoretical and affective narratives.
On the occasion of Gallery Weekend Berlin, an English language curatorial tour with Daniel Birnbaum and Jacqui Davies will accompany the exhibition on May 2 at 11 am, no registration required.
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Daniel Birnbaum is a writer and curator based in Paris. He is Professor of Philosophy at the Städelschule, Frankfurt, where he was rector from 2000 to 2010. He was director of the Moderna Museet, Stockholm, from 2010 to 2018. In 2009 he curated the 53rd Venice Biennale. His most recent exhibitions are Hilma af Klint and Wassily Kandinsky. Dreams of the Future (2024) with Julia Voss at K20, Düsseldorf, and Fata Morgana (2025) with Massimiliano Gioni and Marta Papini for the Fondazione Trussardi at the Palazzo Morando in Milan, and Tremulaciones (2025) with Jacqui Davies at MAZ in Guadalajara. Recent publications include Exhibition, Academy, Museum: Notes on the Frames of Art (Walther König, 2022) and the novel Dr B (Gallimard, 2022). In 2024 Birnbaum joined the Warburg Institute’s Visionary Circle.
Jacqui Davies is a London-based producer and curator, and the director of the production company Primitive Film. She commissioned an annual slate of experimental animation for Channel 4 Television (2005–2010) and has produced over 80 films and installations for cinema, stage, and broadcast, in collaboration with art institutions internationally. Her projects include Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Primitive (2009) at Haus der Kunst in Munich and Pauline Curnier Jardin’s Fat to Ashes (2021) at Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin. Her productions have premiered at international film festivals, including Cannes, Locarno, and the Berlinale. A BAFTA nominee, she was named Breakthrough Producer at the 2018 BritishIndependent Film Awards for RAY & LIZ. Since 2023, in collaboration with Daniel Birnbaum, she has developed an interstitial curatorial and artistic practice, delivering exhibitions, publications, and artistic works that rethink conventional curatorial modes. Her most recent exhibitions include Tremulations (2023–2026), presented in London, Paris, Stockholm, and Guadalajara, and The Quantum Effect (2025) at the San Marco Art Centre, Venice.
The Michel Majerus Estate, housed in the artist’s former studio, is dedicated to researching, presenting, and contextualizing the work of Michel Majerus (1967–2002), and preserving the cultural legacy of an extensive oeuvre created during a short period that began in the late 1980s. In this time, he developed a distinctive visual language that freely drew upon subcultures, mass media, nascent digital technologies and a wide array of art- historical sources, reintegrating their components into his compositions and installations.Since 2012, the Michel Majerus Estate has invited guest curators, scholars and artists to engage with Majerus’s practice through exhibitions and projects staged at the Estate. Previous collaborators include Brigitte Franzen, Fabian Schöneich, Joseph Kosuth, Peter Pakesch, Jordan Wolfson, and Cory Arcangel.
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