Marek Wolfryd’s Content Creation in the Age of Globalized Reproduction is a sprawling floor installation composed of hundreds of mylar letter balloons and air, loosely spelling out a chapter from Walter Benjamin’s seminal essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” In reanimating Benjamin’s text through a material associated with celebration, disposability, and mass production, Wolfryd literalizes the tension between permanence and ephemerality, authenticity and replication. The work holds on to the intellectual legacy of Benjamin’s critique—an idea central to art production since the advent of photography—while simultaneously inflating it into a fragile, fleeting form. Presented in the context of What We Hold On To, the installation underscores Wolfryd’s broader practice, which interrogates the intersection of cultural, economic, and historical
narratives through objects and processes of reproduction. Here, authorship, meaning, and materiality drift—both literally and conceptually—in the air.

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What We Hold On To on view atBlack Cube Headquarters (BCHQ), Englewood, Colorado

Curated by Cortney Lane Stell 

What We Hold On To (exhibition views featuring works by Martin Creed, SANGREE, Jerónimo Reyes-Retana, Amber Cobb, Kimberly Faber, Viviane Le Courtois, Marsha Mack, Anuar Maauad, Cristóbal Gracia, Katherine Simóne Reynolds, and Irene Delka McCray), 2025.

Courtesy of Black Cube Nomadic Art Museum.

Photo: Third Dune Productions.