untitled

pigmentbased inkjet print

signed (pencil) and artist stamp on verso

Nights of Self-Perception
In the photographic series "insomnia", the artist Thomas Palme encounters us as his own counterpart – questioning, playful, yet lucid and simultaneously exhausted. The images are taken during sleepless nights, in times of inner turmoil, in a state between physical restlessness and mental dissolution. What we see are not classically staged self-portraits, but visual records of a self in the moment of its dissolution.
The camera serves not for self-portrayal, for self-observation. It becomes a mirror in a space without a reflection.
The question is less who is showing themselves here than how an ego can still articulate itself under conditions of radical fatigue. In this existential night of images, it is not identities, but states that are at work. The recurring masking – sometimes with gauze, sometimes with paint, with sheets, antlers, fish fins, or branches – functions not as disguise in the classic sense, but as an expression of a deep ambivalence between the desire for visibility and the need for withdrawal. The mask becomes an instrument of self-questioning: it not only conceals the face, it forces it into new forms, undermining the idea of an authentic self-portrait and instead opening up spaces of distortion, irritation, and doubt.
Palme’s photographs are part of a long history of artistic self-portraits, yet at the same time distance themselves from it. The photographic self-portrait – as in the work of Claude Cahun, Francesca Woodman, or Nan Goldin – has always been a site of exploratory movement, introspection, and resistance.
Yet Palme still refuses to subject himself to poetic staging: his images are sparse, raw, almost documetary in their intimacy. They arise not from the desire to create an image of oneself, but from the urge to make one's own existence visible while it eludes grasp.
"insomnia" is not a series about insomnia – it is itself a sleepless meshwork of images. Not a narrative, but a collection of states: isolated, overtired, masked, permeable. […]
(Julia Moebus-Puck, from Thomas Palme, insomnia, 2026)