Ulrik Heltoft & Simon Starling

The Sorcerer’s Apprentices (A Scenario for a Conversation)

29. november - 20. december 2025

Fernisering fredag 28/11 kl. 17 – 19

Ulrik Heltoft and Simon Starling have developed a new collaborative project for Bonamatic. The exhibition and accompanying publication propose a scenario for a conversation between two talking brooms.

The Sorcerer's Apprentices brings up two iconic images of brooms from the very earliest days of photography, William Henry Fox Talbot's The Soliloquy of the Broom from 1841 and The Open Door from 1844. Monologue becomes dialogue, and the images are layered as narratives on top of the animated magic brooms from Walt Disney's early colour classic Fantasia from 1940, and ultimately refer to the film's source, Goethe's poem Der Zauberlehrling from 1797.

The two versions of Fox Talbot's broom photographs are staged in the exhibition through oversized reproductions, presented on photo walls with face holes and installed between the two exhibition rooms in Bonamatic. The photo walls transform the images into so-called 'comic foregrounds', or 'face in hole boards', a popular amusement that was common in marketplaces, in English seaside resorts and funfairs throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. These comic foregrounds allowed people the ‘emancipatory magic’ of being photographed transformed, transported to exotic locations or simply restaged in the everyday. The resulting images, that “memorialise the act of being represented itself” can now be understood as a telling glimpse into the contours of our own contemporary experience of image proliferation and hyperreality.

The broom as a prop and leitmotif is taken further from here, where the photographer is seen as the "new broom" in art, and as the one who sweeps away the prerequisites for image creation in the age of mechanical reproduction. While a necessarily stillsubject in a proto-photographic world of ghostly long exposures, Fox Talbot's broom, as in Disney's cartoon, appears somehow anthropomorphized as it dances through this series of photographs, connecting it even more emphatically to the frames of celluloid that a century later captured Fantasia's rookie sorcerer Mikey Mouse and his uncontrollably replicating magic brooms. In the exhibition these all-red brooms appear arranged backstageas an edition of four 'darkroom mops' as if seen under red safety light in the darkroom.

A companion publication in the form of a limited edition of 50 hand-bound copies of The Sorcerer’s Apprentices (A Scenario for a Conversation) continues the manuscript and will be printed as a key component of Ulrik Heltoft and Simon Starling’s collaborative project.

Image courtesy: The William Henry Fox Talbot Catalogue Raisonné.