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What You Need to Know: ZKM | Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe, Germany, is currently presenting the solo exhibition “Margret Eicher: Digital Worlds,” on view through November 10, 2024. Featuring 14 large-format tapestries by Eicher—who is represented by Galerie Michael Janssen, Berlin—the works draw on digital culture and the language of video games, as well as imagery from science fiction and popular films. The largest of the works included is a 30-meter-long piece, BATTLE:RELOADED (2022), inspired by the Bayeux Tapestry from the 11th century and populated by famous figures from today, both real and fictional—from Julian Assange and Lady Gaga to Lara Croft and the Ninja Turtles. Juxtaposed with this Leviathan work are smaller (but certainly not small) tapestries that further illustrate Eicher’s creative world, replete with characters and places from the popular cultural vernacular.

Margret Eicher, It’s a Digital World 5 (2024). Courtesy of Galerie Michael Janssen, Berlin.

About the Artist: Originally from Viersen, Germany, and currently based in Berlin, artist Margret Eicher is best known for her large-scale tapestries, which she refers to as “media tapestries.” Using the historical, traditional medium as a site to explore contemporary culture and technological advancements, Eicher’s work proposes new uses for the language of information and perspectives in the Digital Age. Incorporating found images and photographs of events and mass media, these works create a new digital world within the textile that simultaneously questions the truth of the various elements. Frequently working in series, each respectively contains a specific aesthetic inclination, but across all of her work methods of collage and appropriation are present.

Margret Eicher, It’s A Digital World 4 (2023). Courtesy of Galerie Michael Janssen, Berling.

Why We Like It: Eicher’s compositions are sites of immersive narrative, with sites both foreign and recognizable—like those drawn from popular games or movies, such as the Death Star which makes an appearance in It’s a Digital World 4 (2023). Drawing from diverse sources, Eichler makes the symbols and motifs her own through their complex and dramatized arrangement. Produced as a tapestry, she also evokes the visual storytelling and tradition of the medium from eras past. Together, Eicher’s approach collapses time and place, and each work could be mistaken for an artifact from another world or alternate reality, one that the viewer could imagine themselves part of. Particularly in a time of heightened anxieties and dialogues around the digital future, Eicher presents possibilities that are as playful as they are theatrical.

“Margret Eicher. Digital Worlds” is on view at ZKM | Center for Art and Media, Karlsruhe, Germany, through November 10, 2024.