Sites of Fiction

Sites of Fiction brings together the work of Jack Garland and Benjamin Pfau, two artists exploring how places transform into fictions. Garland’s Waco reflects on how the 1993 Branch Davidian siege turned a small Texan city into a symbol of tragedy and spectacle. Without photographing Waco itself, he stages images across the U.S. that echo its mythic aura, showing how landscapes absorb fear, memory, and ideology until they become stages for the national psyche. Pfau’s Die Insel takes the opposite approach, conjuring an imagined island through artificial intelligence. Inspired by Rilke’s poem of the same name, the series treats the island not as territory but as a vessel for solitude and longing, producing images that feel both tangible and dreamlike, as if drawn from collective memory.

Together, these works present inverse strategies of fabrication: Garland moves from the real toward myth, while Pfau moves from the imagined toward the real. Both emphasize that landscapes are not only geographic but also psychological, shaped by projection and affect. This dialogue continues in a collaborative project in the Ruhr area, where the artists re-imagine a terrain marked by industry and migration through the same methods of staging and displacement. Across these bodies of work, Sites of Fiction asks what it means to inhabit places that are at once material and imaginary—sites sustained as much by cultural imagination as by physical ground.