The last time I wrote a piece on the German artist Thomas Demand I visited his studio in Berlin. It was January 2001 and a life-size paper and cardboard facsimile of the emergency counting centre in Dade County, Florida that had been the focus of George W. Bush’s contested election victory filled the room. While the rest of the world looked on in disbelief Demand immediately recast the hyper-televised debacle as art. The result was his large-scale photograph Poll, a work which he refused to consider partisan in any way. “They’re all so stupid”, I remember him then saying, referring to the politics of America as a whole. “It’s what they deserve.”

If from Goethe to Gursky ironic detachment has been a constant feature of German culture then Demand has adapted it to the media age. His photographs and films of a pared down paper and cardboard universe often have as their starting point images culled from the news or other historical archives. By the time we encounter his work what we see is at least three removes from any point of origin, a version of reality that has been filtered through lenses and memories and lenses again.

Like Poll, his recent pictures Gate and Kitchen both deal with still warm events, the first being modelled on images taken from a CCTV camera of some of the 9/11 hijackers before they boarded the plane, the second on the hideout where Saddam Hussein was apprehended by the invading American forces. Yet Demand’s trademark flat lighting and the absence of any writing in these cool, strangely pristine environments make them feel timeless as though they have been abstracted from their historical substrate.

In earlier works such as Archive and Diving Board this amnesiac rendition of history raised questions about the repression of Germany’s Nazi past. Here though the effect is parodic and even, in the case of Attempt which depicts an artist’s studio commandeered by Baader-Meinhoff terrorists back in the 70s, somewhat comic.

Six years ago, concerned that the sculptural aspects of his work were being eclipsed by the photographic ones, Demand began making films. If it was a move that enabled him to explore more fully the three-dimensionality of his paper worlds, it also highlighted the position of narrative in his work. Like his still images, each of the five films he has made to date is underpinned by a back story. Yet while the photographs compact history into a single moment, the films remain, on a formal level at least, distinctly non-narrative.

The endlessly repeated three-second loop of spinning plates that comprises Trick contemplates the very essence of the moving image. Based on the Lumiere brothers’ 1896 film Assiettes Tournantes, Trick revels in that earliest period of cinema where the mere fact of the new medium was enough to make it worth watching. “It was an interesting phase of cinema”, Demand explains. “It wasn’t documentary or fiction or drama, it was just made to be looked at.” That this prototype of a disinterested optics should appeal to him is hardly surprising. For time and again his work shows us how absolute irony – that god’s eye refusal to take sides in human affairs – is matchlessly served by an impassive gaze.