Photography with video installation

© Elise EERAERTS

Drawings / Paintings / Installation

Behind is the new series of drawings and paintings by the Belgian artist Philip Henderickx (1976). These tableaux at the outer limits of medical science and carnival rituals show women with cloud-like hairdos, rubber gloves and bizarre measuring devices on their heads. The stage seems set to examine something and to perform operations unknown to us.
What is behind the masks and under the gloves? What are the scientific instruments measuring and where are the operations leading to? Who is watching and who is being watched? To whom is something being done and who is doing it? Behind provides no answers but reformulates the question in a humorous-threatening universe where nothing is what it seems.

© Philip HENDERICKX

Photography

In her photographic work, Sarah Van Marcke examines the position of the human body in the urban landscape. Transformed into photographic images and serving as backdrops, the existing urban or architectural site seems to have lost both reality and functionality. The chosen sites are often the result of visionary or sometimes even utopian ideas.
In her work, Sarah confronts her own body to the constructed landscape and questions the way we move in this space. Behind and in front of the camera at the same time, Sarah is the “anti-subject” of the image; her abandoned body is mainly used as an object that adapts to its environment by imitating form, colour, shape or function. The actions are exaggerated in order to show the eldritch and eerie relationship with contemporary form of space. Beneath the surface, the photographs question the utopian motivation of architects and planners. The images show the beauty of the architecture, the character is used to create or subvert the balance of the image. In an often humorous way, they flirt with the shapes of the space. However, there is always a glimpse of melancholy and sadness, in order to give an account on the dark side of reality behind these visionary constructions (like unsettling living conditions, corrosion, decay and disintegration) and putting them in a historical perspective. In her recent work, Sarah also often uses the architecture itself as the main character to its environment. In these works, the platitude of some of the captured architectural sites is uplifted to a heroic status.

© Sarah VAN MARCKE

Photography

“In these photos, in my way I look for who I am.
The question “who am I?” is a question that goes beyond the fact of whether or not you have identity papers. This question, that every human being asks throughout his life, whether he is powerful or wretched. This question: who am I is the first one that every human being must ask before being able to recognise others, different from himself but also so alike.
I will thus continue to ask this question in all my photographs; that is how I met you and that is how I can continue to meet others, so different and so alike.” – Bernadette Nicolas

© Hélène A. AMOUZOU

Drawings / Paper sculptures

My work is most often presented in the form of installations that question the given context and place.
Where is the line between the second and third dimension? What are the links, the similarities and contradictions that the flat and volume can present?
During this questioning an infinity of possibilities emerge and imply a confrontation with the location and context of the exhibition. My intention is to define a certain space, with this fine limit between two things, felt as a barely perceptible vibration.

© Sandra BIWER

Paintings / Multimedia installation

As this quote from the television series “Twin Peaks“ (David Lynch & Mark Frost, 1990-1991) says so well, appearances can be deceptive. Whether it is question of dark woods or corridors of the underground, we are slightly aware of the hidden realities and the parallel worlds which inhabit them.
Taking inspiration from urban spaces encoutered in daily life, the work of Marie-Laure Delaby calls upon these parallel realities: travelling from photography via painting to installation, the image becomes the receptacle of our imagination. Her work questions our contemporary environment through multiple manipulations of the medium.
Indeed, the exhibition “The owls are not what they seem“ leads the viewer to discover various stages in the mutation of the painted image. Transformed into a reactive installation or a projection surface, it becomes generator of illusions, questionning the reality of the space, of the image and the experience undergone.

© Marie-Laure DELABY

Dessin / Installation de projections vidéo

Un dialogue entre les spécificités du dessin et celle de la vidéo révèle l’état d’incommunicabilité du personnage.
Projection d’un extrait de film sur un dessin : un visage féminin, dans un moment d’émotion intense, est gêné par une tache. C’est la trace des mouvements de sa bouche image après image et du défilement des sous-titres s’il y en a.
Le spectateur est balancé entre une position distanciée et une forte empathie.
Le processus lui-même est à la fois froid (décomposition systématique du morceau de film) et émotif (l’artiste vient masquer ou soigner cette bouche geste après geste, obsessionnellement).

© Sandrine MORGANTE

Photography / Installation

Time seems frozen.
What has happened in these nocturnal, mysterious landscapes? Why are they devoid of human presence? When were they photographed?
These landscapes are a mix of different spaces photographed at different times of day, which creates a feeling of strangeness. With their refined form, they are archetypes of places we have known. But memories are blurred, manipulated: the places where we used to walk nonchalantly every day now seem strange and menacing. Could our memory be deceiving us?
This exhibition is the place to construct a fiction, that of a suspended world which has taken the time to stop.

© Stéphanie ROLAND

Sculpture / Photography / Installation

Pursuing the line of their cooperation, Sven Laurent and Maxim Frank confront sculpture in the image or, more broadly, the volume to the plan. The two artists aim to involve and confront the onlookers in different forms of reading, sometimes inviting them to engage with the works physically. However, they remain free to choose their own reading from the multitude of possible viewpoints. In fact, each of the pieces is presented in such a way as to offer a double visibility. First, from the outside of the gallery, offering rather a view of the whole, frontal. Second, from the interior, where the reading occurs more in depth and in intimate relation with the different works.

© Maxim FRANK & Sven LAURENT

Video projection / Installation

“Amidst the real, this common stock of signs and things that surround us, Thomas Bernadet extracts from the ordinary what could then become particular from a certain point of view. This personal vision is formed in the multitude of his cultural influences. His “look” lights on what all the “looks” might see. This may be a simple fragment of everyday life or in the order of a loan, from art history, for example. Thomas Bernardet thus samples from the real that which attracts his attention and allows it to mature in the form of “working documents”. Among what is collected intuitively, certain documents in time come to “reveal” themselves more as particular, as they say in photography, and bring out the reflection of an awareness that had escaped one’s attention.”- Extract of a text by Martial Déflacieux

© Thomas BERNARDET