August 27, 2026 | Art & Culture
SIMON FUJIWARA
the ARCHITECTURE
of EXPERIENCE
words Rajesh Punj
exhibition photos Andrea Rossetti
portrait photos Jörg von Bruchhausen
A thought-provoking conversation with Simon Fujiwara on A Whole New World, which recently closed at Mudam Luxembourg, and the questions of identity, reality and experience that continue to shape his practice.
“We are, in a sense, our own fictions.” — after Jorge Luis Borges
Few artists of his generation have examined the unstable architecture of identity with the wit and conceptual precision of Simon Fujiwara. Across installation, film, sculpture and immersive exhibition environments, the Berlin-based artist has consistently returned to the question of how the self is made: through memory, image, desire, performance and, increasingly, the relentless mechanisms of visibility that define contemporary life.
Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard once warned that “the greatest hazard of all, losing one’s self, can occur very quietly in the world, as if it were nothing at all.” The observation feels uncannily resonant in relation to Fujiwara’s sense of the real, where the erosion of selfhood is rarely dramatic, but instead staged through systems of projection, circulation and display.
His works occupy the fertile space between autobiography and invention, where personal history becomes narrative and narrative assumes the force of truth. In recent years, this inquiry has taken on renewed urgency through projects such as Who the Bær, a seemingly innocent figure that operates as a vessel for projection, ideology, trauma and the circulation of images in a digitally saturated culture.
What appears playful is never merely so. Beneath the seduction of the surface lies a more unsettling meditation on the politics of representation, spectatorship and the fictions through which we come to know ourselves. At a moment when identity is increasingly staged, branded and endlessly reproduced, Fujiwara’s work asks whether the self has itself become an exhibition space — a site of perpetual construction and display.
A DIFFERENT REALITY
RP: You mention a new studio in Mallorca.
SF: Yes. It’s an old house with agricultural buildings. It’s not going to be massive, it’s not a huge thing, but it’s also a way to try something else because my work is quite urban in a way. My work is so much about conflict and collage, ideas and worlds that collide and meet and produce new problems. The aesthetic of my work is about that somehow.
I’ve always worked in cities, so I’m curious to see what working in a non-urban place is going to be like because, in this village, people don’t even know what’s happening in the Middle East. It’s a completely different reality.
RP: That must be an incredible idea — the potential for it to really challenge your work.
SF: Let’s see. Because when I think about my work, I realise that I’ve always made it to solve problems for myself, in a way, or to try to engage with problems within my life, or with how to live in this world.
All the works are like life rafts in this sea of madness that we’re in. If it’s a question around Anne Frank, or an STD, or a ‘MeToo’ problem, or whatever, I can hold on to that, and it can become a metaphor for all the struggles that I’m experiencing on a daily basis — and I know everybody else is too.
Part of that has been using language, because we’re surrounded by so much of it today. There is very little that is unsaid, unmarketed, unbranded, untouched. We’re in this exhausted world where every single thing has already been described.
RP: It’s interesting. It’s as if silence has become its own kind of commodity.
SF: Absolutely. I like this phrase, “the airless quality of capitalism.” There’s almost no oxygen left in the room, and I’m telling you, in the next ten to twenty years, there will be entrance tickets to cities. There will be ticketing; it’s simply going to happen. There is already something of that in certain parts of historic centres. It feels like the only way to sustain this way of living. So I keep seeing, in the real world, how much it is bending to the logic of theme park worlds.
THE LOGIC OF THE THEME PARK
RP: Which is extraordinary and unsettling at the same time.
SF: Exactly. Architects in the 1980s were already talking about Disneyland as a kind of urban utopia in America, because it was one of the few places where you could simply walk down the street.
And what it takes to create that most basic act — walking from a shop to a park to a castle to the next thing — is something we take for granted in Europe. But Europe itself was constructed that way. Kingdoms, gods, kings, land: these are not natural things, they are constructs. In that sense, we already had our own natural Disneys. We’re very snooty now about what theme parks are, but in a way, we live in them, and perhaps always have.
RP: So Europe itself becomes a set, a stage.
SF: Precisely. And that’s why, when I started studying theme parks, I found them fascinating, because they have such clear parallels with museums.
A museum is also a place where you buy a ticket, queue and enter a controlled space for delight, pleasure and sometimes even danger. You are brought into other worlds, but there are rules: you can’t touch paintings, shout or behave however you want.
I began asking myself why these sanctuaries are so appealing to us today. We went through that whole 1990s moment of institutional critique, when museums were supposed to be open — no tickets, no boundaries; it was about smell, light and atmosphere.
But now we are back to wanting the blockbuster, branded experience. I feel that’s because the world outside has become this kind of chaos, where we know we are being controlled but we’re not told the rules. We know we are in this strange theme park, but we don’t know when we are transgressing, or how much information is being taken from us. It’s very murky.
RP: So the museum becomes a place of clarity.
SF: Exactly. These places, where the rules are clear, somehow offer comfort.
I mean, I’m half Japanese, and people are obsessed with Japan now. Talk about a rule-based society — a place with ancient codes for how to talk, dress, move. In its own way, that too is a kind of theme park.
I started asking myself how this could become artistic, how it could become a gesture within art that was interesting. So much of my work is already about entertainment and performativity, so bringing the installations together wasn’t a huge stretch.
I simply thought, MUDAM is this extraordinary museum, half shopping mall, half I. M. Pei building, with all the aura of the Louvre architect, so why not use the full logic of a theme park?
There are signposts, maps, worlds. Only here, the princess is not a princess, but the beauty queen caught in a 'topless scandal'; the mascot is not Mickey Mouse, but a cartoon bear having an identity crisis.
A PLACE TO BELONG
RP: They become contemporary myths.
SF: Exactly, they map onto one another. And the final thing that really interested me about theme parks is that we are craving shared narratives.
Culturally, communally, in this globalised moment, we are all longing for something we can rally around: a story. We can no longer really do that through religion, for obvious reasons. So I’ve also been thinking about what it means to create an experience that is shared rather than fragmented. I don’t expect people to immediately jump on board with syphilis, or whatever I might be speaking about specifically, but the atmosphere of the place can make you feel welcomed.
That’s what theme parks do. They let you know where you are; there is always a map that situates you and reassures you that you are in the right place. And I thought, if I can make you feel, at an animal, bodily level, that you belong in this museum and that this is for you, then it creates something like the atmosphere of a church, or a place of gathering.
Those are the ingredients, in a way.
RP: It’s extraordinary how all of this seems to be shifting at once — the idea of the real, the image, experience itself.
SF: Yes, and it’s only about to get weirder. The world is about to become much stranger in terms of how we describe the real and how we experience it. AI is obviously one element of that, but there’s another side as well: people are now openly interested in hallucinogenic drugs, psychedelics, altered states, consciousness. All this language that once felt marginal now seems fully part of contemporary discourse.
To me, that’s an acknowledgement that reality is far more complex than we previously understood, and that the technological changes we’re living through are part of that shift.
MATERIALS OF TRUTH
RP: And beyond questions of reality and identity, I wanted to ask about material — your choice of materials and processes, and how these relate to what you are trying to address.
SF: I’ve always tried to use the material that best speaks to what I’m trying to convey, and sometimes the choice is very intrinsic to the idea itself.
For example, when I made a version of Anne Frank in wax, working with people from Madame Tussauds, it was because I was interested in that very specific history: the idea that famous people are rendered three-dimensionally in wax because, before photography, it was one of the closest technologies to truth.
And when you begin to look into the history of Madame Tussauds, it becomes extraordinary. She was in the palace of Louis XIV, making flowers for Marie Antoinette, so the history of Madame Tussauds is, in a way, part of the history of the modern world itself.
During the French Revolution, she was supposed to be killed because she had been in the palace — not exactly the right place to be. But because she had learned from her father how to make realistic wax figures, she saved herself by offering to go to the sites where the aristocracy had been beheaded, take death masks and remake them in wax so that these figures would be remembered.
She then took this bag of wax heads to London and opened her apartment on Baker Street with a display of French aristocrats on skewers with blood.
That was the first Madame Tussauds. And that is already eighteenth-century England: pleasure gardens, the beginnings of entertainment culture. For me, all of that is fascinating because the history of the modern world can almost be told through wax figures. So when I came to Anne Frank, I knew I needed to make that wax rendering, and I needed it to be made with the people who had worked within Madame Tussauds.
In that sense, the collaborators themselves can become part of the material.
RP: You have me seeing everything differently.
