Hyperallergic published a review of This Is Us, curated by Fabian Flückiger, at Z33 in Hasselt, a striking group exhibition featuring 3 works by Emmanuel Van der Auwera.
Read the full article by D. Graham Burnett here
"But what gets reflected back at Z33 is hardly bucolic. On the contrary, out that window you look at Noonan’s black glass across the way, catching, in its reflection, a disturbing glimpse back over your own shoulder at a powerful new work by the Belgian media artist Emmanuel Van der Auwera. “VideoSculpture XXVI” (2022) — fittingly subtitled “Over-the-Horizon” — showcases the artist’s charismatic “knife-to-screen” technique of dissecting LCD screens and messing with their polarizing layers to uncanny effect: What appears to the naked eye as undifferentiated and blinding white light, reveals, when viewed through a mounted plate-glass disc, military surveillance footage. The imagery is familiar, part of the dystopian internet archive of American drone slayings. But here, it emerges creepily from a blasted white-out of pure luminosity. The construction offers a visual instantiation of dominant dynamics in our data lives: searing oversaturation that secrets horrors; hidden systems of filtration that determine what we see.
Nearby, a slightly older Auwera piece, “VideoSculpture XIV (Shudder)” of 2018, works the same necro-technical magic by means of a floor-mounted black glass plate. The physics of the game can be worked out: at certain angles, light reflected off glass undergoes polarization effects, and those are what reveal the menacing imagery (here, armed soldiers on march) secreted in Auwera’s white light. The emotional impact, however, is strong and unsettling. Bright light, endlessly figured as hope, truth, and inspiration, has here become the blinding bearer of very bad news."
