Pieter Geenen at the Museum of Ixelles
Beyond innocence.
The work of Pieter Geenen goes beyond innocence. Innocence? That is the time before you get infected. The precise moment before you become aware of good and evil. As yet there are no limits, there is no other side. You are what matters. Those limits constitute the framework of Pieter Geenen’s exhibition: the borderline between here and there, between migrants and tourists, between day and night. Between the image and reality.
Pieter van Bogaert
And yet it all started out so innocently, as a memory of some trip. A projector on the floor shows a video as a postcard, no bigger in size than a TV screen. Get on your knees if you really want to see. Even then details are hardly distinguished from the overall picture. The picture? A landscape in Spain. The details? Those are cars with tourists. Their goal? That is the sea beyond the hills. And the result? Pixel-like tourists, anonymous movements and a generic image.
Tourism sets the tone. The artist surrounds his images with paraphernalia from his travels. Genuine postcards, a boat ticket, a travel visa and a light bulb, now useless except as a souvenir. The bulb – like the tourists in the postcard video – is a pixel. Once it was part of a Turkish flag on a ridge past the Greek-Cypriot border. Every evening the Turks let the lights of the flag twinkle in the Greek night. That lamp as a pixel and that flag as a souvenir are part of the construction: the construction of an image, of a reality. Another display contains more souvenirs: Armenian books for children, part of the construction of an identity. The letters and the images appear exotic, but the texts are indoctrinating and they push us beyond innocence.
MIRROR
Pieter Geenen sets up his exhibition in a single continuous space. Somewhere halfway through he inserts part of a wall, which divides the environment in two. The wall on one side: the souvenirs, as some kind of antechamber for the real work. On the other: a screen with three videos in a loop. Each video focuses on a border. Between Turkish and Greek Cyprus in 'pulsation' (2011), between Turkey and Armenia in 'relocation' (2011) and around Fortress Europe in 'nocturne' (2006).
The subject of borders seamlessly weaves the videos together. In these videos all of our attention is directed at the other side. Think of the mirror in Alice's Wonderland. A similar mirror effect continues the borders throughout the various videos. These documentary images appear as fiction, a construct, and a projection. With good reason, the artist would say. Is there any other way of making a documentary? It is as if he offers us a mirror, through each work, each image in each video. That is his way of criticising the media. He shows what the media keep off camera – what does not fit in with their logic. At Lampedusa this is the image of Europe as a mirage: the coast, the sand, the sea, the city, fireworks, the airport, the freedom of "l’isola più bella del mondo", but all of it filmed at night. That is when most refugees arrive at the island and get their first glimpse of the promised continent.
INVERT
These videos make use of inversions. Not the tourists gaze of sunlit Lampedusa, but the night. Not the Greek identity on that part of Cyprus, but rather the enormous Turkish flag. Not the two peaks of mount Ararat, as people would perceive it on the Armenian side, but their mirror: this way the Armenian side seems to align with the Turkish one after all.
"Objects in mirror are further than they appear", the beginning of 'relocation' warns us. This is an inversion: not "closer", but "further". By mirroring the image of the mountain, by giving the Armenians on one side the impression they are already on the other, their goal seems removed even further. Or the closer you come as a tourist, as a refugee, as a migrant, the further away happiness lies. This is the media landscape of Pieter Geenen: as we come closer to the images, they escape apprehension.
By subsequently projecting these three films on a single screen, all these landscapes, all these images, become aligned. The Lampedusa lights blend with the lights of the Turkish-Cypriot flag, which spill over into the lights of the border crossing post at the foot of Mount Ararat. They are beacons that disappear as soon as day breaks. In the twilight zone between day and night Ararat finds itself on the hill by the border in Cyprus, just for a while. For a single moment it is as if the landscape moves like the sea at the beginning of 'nocturne'. It is part of the inversion, the 'relocation', which takes him from Africa to Europe (through darkness), from Turkey to Greece (by playing the sound, recorded in the flag on the Turkish side, along the image of the Greek side) and ultimately from Armenia to Turkey (through the mirror effect).
NOCTURNE (BIS)
Pieter Geenen’s newest work, 'nocturne #2', is now showing in Bruges and soon at Manifesta. 'nocturne #2' was filmed at night in the streets of Teheran. The city is abandoned apart from some traces of movement: people as pixels. Similar to 'nocturne', Geenen picks a specific dispositive. On Lampedusa this was an infrared camera, also used to guard the borders at night. In Teheran he films with a mobile phone: this is the spring of 2011 and mobile phones are a major image supplier of the Arab Spring.
But there is a difference. Contrary to the moving images of the Arab Spring, Geenen puts his phone on a tripod. Here lies the meaning of the "New perspectives of protest", at the start of this video. In doing so the artist shifts the hope of the Arab spring to the unaffected potential of Iran at night. The tripod, the empty space, the people as pixels and ultimately the pixel itself, of the mobile phone, are all part of that potential.
As was the case in 'nocturne', Geenen chooses for a film without sound and without commentary. And in the same way this video revolves around the attraction of the night as a potential and as a mirror of the day. This is how the artist criticizes the media: in the voids he leaves between the images, in the no man’s land he creates as an inevitable boundary, a buffer, between the media and the self. This no man’s land, this potential, is there for the audience. It pushes these videos beyond innocence.
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