Black Label

Black Label, Thomas Demand’s 2009 collaboration with BORCH Editions, is a suite of four photogravures. The images depict a cardboard reconstruction of a building situated in the Japanese city of Kitakyushu which houses a bar named Black Label.
The small Japanese bar first raised Demand’s curiosity because of its surprising, septagonal shape, which did not seem to relate to anything around the site. The three-storey house has just enough space for a bar with five seats and two karaoke rooms upstairs. It is a replacement of an identical structure that was demolished 10 years earlier, some 100 meters away from its current location. The city offered the owner this act of reconstruction as compensation for his willingness to move to another spot and make room for a shopping mall. Hence the houses’ septagonal shape, which was created for the piece of land it originally stood on.