The solo show shares its title with Gaillard’s major new film installation and is completed by his latest wall sculptures. Amplifying the film’s themes of conservation and decay, the sculptures explore the patterns by which forms, spaces and histories interweave across time.

A new series of fabric-wrapped acoustic panels, salvaged from the gutted auditorium of Trieste’s Museo Revoltella, line the gallery wall. The large-scale panels bear the beautiful ghostly pattern of repeated touch: past visitors brushed against the fabric, inadvertently leaving marks that turn the surfaces into abstract canvases or modern cave paintings.

Building on his previous exploration of the sculptural qualities of three-dimensional moving images, the work extends beyond the confines of the screen. By harnessing cutting-edge technology to its full potential, Gaillard offers an expanded, sharpened and deeply affecting novel view of the world around us.

Retinal Rivalry is named after the visual perception phenomenon that occurs when the brain receives two conflicting images at the same time. Instead of blending into one 3D image, the neural system alternates between prioritising one image while suppressing the other, causing confusion and discomfort for the viewer.

Throughout Retinal Rivalry, various stairs, spirals and lifts allude to a state of constant ascent and descent, emphasising the interplay between distance and closeness, chasmic depth and vivid sculptural representation. The film rhythmically pulses with images that swell and contract, inflate and deflate. Manipulating viewers’ sense of depth, scale and texture, it renders familiar materials and locations uncanny, highlighting the inherent inaccuracies and distortions of representation. Recording the ordinary world in magnificent detail while aiming to look beneath the surface of things, Retinal Rivalry is a depiction of space and time, destabilising modes of representation and offering a new hyper-vision version of reality.

An early scene places us inside a glass recycling bin, up close between discarded bottles that stretch deep behind the screen and flies buzzing around our heads—Gaillard’s objects materialise in space. Vignettes of collectable Meissen porcelain animal figurines appear like strange scavengers among the rubbish. The bottlenecks and broken glass call to mind the composition of Caspar David Friedrich’s The Sea of Ice (1823–24), with its sharp step-like layers of sheets of ice. When the container opens, the “sea” of spirit and wine bottles spills into a dump far below, performing a kind of ritualistic libation in remembrance of the dead. Gaillard has made alcohol and its deteriorative and amnesic effects the subject of previous works, such as his anti-monument Recovery of Discovery (2011), a pyramid made of beer bottles, which touches on the paradox of (self-)destructive behaviour driven by the instinct for (self-)preservation.

Retinal Rivalry evokes moments of intoxication and disorientation as we are enveloped inside the head of Bavaria, a nineteenth-century female personification of the Bavarian state, the first colossal bronze statue made since classical antiquity. A shaky shot slowly draws us towards an opening, revealing a view of the Oktoberfest’s big wheel turning above Munich. At the feet of “Mama Bavaria” lies what is known as Kotzhügel (vomit hill) on the fringe of the beer festival, where an inebriated young man sleeps off his hangover. Back inside the statue’s head, the camera moves nervously from side to side as if to ask: how did we get here?

The film’s score draws from diverse sonic elements, bolstering its exploration of dissonance and synchrony. Indonesian instrumental music is reworked and combined with field recordings of heavy machinery rumbling and strangely melodic retching. The soundtrack also incorporates the opening lines to Werner Herzog’s Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972), along with its accompanying overture by German band Popol Vuh. The soundscape of Retinal Rivalry contrasts its images—what we see is often at odds with what we hear. Only one section lets sound and image converge: a fractured leg pumps the pedal of an interactive organ to play a piece by Johann Sebastian Bach that repeatedly falters.

The film Retinal Rivalry will be on view at Haus der Kunst in Munich from October 3, 2025, to March 8, 2026.

The soundtrack to the film will be released later this year by Berlin-based record label PAN.