The media are the main mode of reception of art by the public. This situation has gone hand in hand with the development of the mass media since the 1950s. Due to their functioning in networks, the new media have intensified this mode of transmission, anyone now being at the same time receiver, producer and disseminator of information , in other words, a media operator.
Pushing this logic to the extreme in order to question it, Clouds in the Cave is based on the provocative observation that an exhibition would only be a pretext to produce images and no longer a means of sanctifying objects according to the logic specific to the industrial era that persists in museums. The first floor of Fri Art is transformed into a device that refers to a photography studio where a white background allows angles and edges to disappear in order to give the illusion of a void in which objects seem to float. The white cube then turns into a white box. The conditions for the future layout of the exhibition are thus amplified. The gaze of the viewer is therefore assimilated to that of the photographer. He sees a succession of images that recombine as he wanders.

This circulation of exhibitions and works in the form of images is not without influence on their conception. In his text My Work for Magazine Pages, Dan Graham remarked: "During my experience as a gallery owner, I learned that if a work had not benefited from critical texts and reproduction, it had difficulty in being recognized as art. It seemed that for a work to be defined as having artistic value, it had to be exhibited in a gallery, written about, and reproduced as a photograph in a magazine. . [1] The artistic and therefore economic value of an object depends on its context but also on its media coverage. In the network model, this implies that an exhibition and a work must perform well in order to access the right platforms and aggregate clicks and likes. Photogenicity becomes an essential condition for success.
Clouds in the Cave presents a series of works of which one could say that, if they were subjects, they would be “aware” of being photographed. Far from completely enslaving themselves to photographic imperatives, some “play” with the lens by trying to make the image that will be drawn of them lie. For example, the collective work of Marta Riniker-Radich and Alan Bogana reproduces with adhesives on the columns of the room - the last architectural element that remains in a space without three-dimensional landmarks - the reflection of a fictitious event that the viewer of the exhibition photography alone will imagine it as taking place in the off-screen of the im

Florian Auer and Carmen Gheorghe also offer a collaborative work that questions sculpture and its relationship to photography. The first presents a series of sports jerseys that seem to float in the air like holograms or relics of an augmented reality football match. Like shrouds or three-dimensional photograms, the swimsuits retain the imprint of the absent body. On the ground, Carmen Gheorghe traces the image of a vertical geometric volume in shimmering sand. Depending on the angle of view, the drawing on the ground and the fake hologram in space combine to give the image of a sculpture placed on its base, reminiscent of the works of Brancusi. The Romanian artist also enjoyed staging his sculptures in numerous photographs and films in order to animate them, magnify their surfaces and arouse emotions.

Going to the end of the logic of the exhibition, Phillip Zach's proposal detaches itself from the physical space to lodge itself solely in the work of photographic documentation of the exhibition, through a distortion in these pictures. The exhibition will therefore also be immediately visible on the art center's website in order to allow the spectator to experiment and thwart the traps that are offered to his perception in a back and forth between the physical space and the 'screen.
The whole can be read as a shadow theatre, a cave of Plato, where to paraphrase Jean Baudrillard, the simulacra do not hide a truth, but constitute the only reality.