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scènes troublées
2009, slide installation, multi screen, black & white, dimensions variable
WITH THE SUPPORT OF - Flemish Community, Flemish Community Commission, beeldende kunst Strombeek/Mechelen (bkSM)
installation views



                                         

 
  'scènes troublées' (troubled scenes) is a modulatable installation of monumental black & white slide projections showing broad and deserted, and seemingly trivial landscapes or places. The images only fully appear after being some time in the dark. In origin these found images are photographs from a belgian colonial family that once lived in eastern Congo. They are dated between 1940 and 1943 and are taken in the border region between Congo, Rwanda and Burundi, in the heart of Africa. Throughout times these landscapes have been the scenery of different tragedies: colonialism, Rwandan genocide, Congolese civil wars,... Images of endless flows of refugees like we know them from TV news are to be situated here.

This purified selection of images is now given a timeless character. Being registrations of landscapes, originally limited in time and space, they are ‘stretched’ to a certain everlastingness and generality, which alows a Hineininterpretierung of the original material. The specific combination of images in this installation setting creates new relations and a certain but subtle tension field. In the burdened aesthetics of this constructed stillness 'scènes troublées' reflects on the landscape as a bearer of meaning and its relation to personal memory.

Time is a book - TIME Festival, Ghent (BE), curators Dirk Braeckman & Els Dietvorst, 2009
Shot by Both Sides - Pieter Geenen & Johan Grimonprez - bkSM #8, cc Strombeek / De Garage Mechelen (BE), 2009