For his first institutional solo exhibition in Germany British artist Tris Vonna-Michell (b. 1982) has designed an exhibition at  the Cuboid.

Tris Vonna-Michell tells stories. At a frantic speed, he develops a single episode into an entire network of narratives that captivate his audience. He surprises with subtle changes in tone and tempo, and with sudden turns—he is always a step ahead of himself and prepared for the next change in direction. The path through his stories hence retraces their genesis, the research that precedes them: the accidental find, the “hearsay,” the sleuthing of traces, the reconstruction of faded memories, the documentation, the re-telling.

Tris Vonna-Michell narrates history. He thus continues the long tradition of oral transmission and negotiates memory in a new form, moving in the grey area between fact and fiction. Collating a play with the questionable status of certain narrative elements, an intermixture of “private” and “political” histories, and various “documentary” media, he creates a hybrid historical space that simultaneously reflects on the possibility of historical narrative: During his oral narration, he adapts the narrative sequence to the circumstances and time of his present narrative situation. The story therefore changes constantly, gaining in precise and pointed moments, but remains unbound by linear structure.

In the exhibition space, the juxtaposition of texts, (filmic) images, props, and sound traces, all of which are instruments of the oral narration, are condensed into a composition of different times and perspectives that comment upon and complement each other, into a heterotopia.

The title of his first solo exhibition at an institution in Germany, Puzzlers, equally refers to attempts at a (re)construction of history. Since the Spring of 2005, Tris Vonna-Michell has worked on an ongoing project that originated from a newspaper article concerning the comprehensive destruction of Stasi files in the Autumn of 1989. A new chapter of this narration is being created for the exhibition in Braunschweig: Puzzlers describes the work of the “Reconstruction” team working under the Federal Commissioner for the Records of the Former State Security Service of the GDR.