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Seeing is Revealing – as uncovering something that is underlying – is a maxim that unfolds throughout Emmanuel Van der Auwera’s oeuvre. An attentive observer of our time, the Belgian artist approaches current events and themes through their imagery, revealing the deeper implications of their content and dissemination. His first solo exhibition in Switzerland invites us to encounter his impressive visual worlds, which challenge our perceptions and deepen our understanding of images’ technically constructed quality and distribution through the media. In her extensive review “It’s Not So Quiet. The Return of Art Basel in June, “Young” Fairs, New Spaces for Exchange, and What’s Most Interesting in the Unexpected Heat of Basel, Eleonora Milani wrote that “Emmanuel Van der Auwera’s solo show “Seeing is Revealing,” which looks at the effect of technological devices as filters through which we perceive and view the world of images, is one of the most interesting and solid exhibitions of the season.”
These works hinge on highly publicised current events, and illuminate the tragedies, tendencies and taboos of our media-infested world. The material Van der Auwera departs from is not only collected from streaming platforms, but also news channels and commercial providers’ image databases. His visual archive reveals their constructed reality, which he accentuates by highlighting the relationship between fact and fiction. Driven by the pursuit of "collective human experience”, the artist addresses fundamental issues of today’s world, ranging from the expansion of the surveillance state to simulated realities and deepfakes.
Emmanuel Van der Auwera: Seeing is Revealing – offers a representative overview of the artist's work and presents three new works created for the show at HEK. The exhibition and the supporting programme are supported by Vidi-Square, MindSpaces S+T+ARTS Lighthouse, the Volkart Foundation and the BLKB Foundation for Culture and Education.
Curator: Sabine Himmelsbach
Photos: Franz Wamhof
Emmanuel Van der Auwera: Photograph by Moritz Schermbach
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VideoSculpture XXV (Archons)
8 LCD screens, black glass, cable, 19 min. HD video, color sound 310 x 310 x 170cmThe large-format VideoSculpture XXV (Archons) consists of eight manipulated screens and four black glass plates via which the images can be seen in their inverted form. In this new work, Van der Auwera reflects on the presence of artificial intelligence in today’s visual worlds and the notion of digital immortality. With poetic images, he takes us into the world of deepfakes and AI-generated liquefied landscapes. These transform themselves again and again into new scenarios, into nostalgic images of a «dream machine» that uses the aesthetics of well-known photo databases. The narrative also includes documentary images that herald the «post-truth» era. In the age of AI, we can no longer trust our eyes and the sound level also underlines the possibilities of AI in the perfect interpretation of human voices. Even the human being can be digitally incarnated based on his data. We are immersed in poetic visions of a post-mortal digital life.
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While intended to be seen embedded within the VideoSculpture format, for those unable to visit the exhibition you may view the film here.
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Emmanuel Van der Auwera's films gravitate around something missing - a subject, an image, or an event in absentia. At the intersection of documentary and dramaturgy, he brings the real into a state of disappearance, urging us to question the image world as it begins to overlap with physical space. In the use of new social technologies, Van der Auwera sees a reflection of archetypal impulses, from the desire to make representations of our world, to our fascination with cruelty, the performative nature of tragedy, and, ultimately, the human quest for immortality.
- Caroline Dumalin
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VideoSculpture XX (The World's 6th Sense)
2019, 6 LCD screens, polarization filter, plexiglass, 10 tripods, cables, HD video, 13 mins 34 secsThe installation deconstructs the concept of visibility, putting the viewer in an uncomfortable position between a world transformed into an unstoppable flux of images and the necessity of critically questioning it.
- Aurelien Le Genissel, On Psychotic Images and Other Visual Symptoms, Mousse Magazine
Advertised as the world’s ‘sixth sense,’ thermal imaging offers precise surveillance for a range of uses – firefighting, navigation, safety and law enforcement, pest control, and medical diagnostics. Used for field demonstrations filmed to market the latest technology to military contractors, the footage in VideoSculpture XX (The World’s 6th Sense) flaunts a thermographic camera’s skills at capturing detail and range – yet paints a phantasmal portrait of the Las Vegas Strip, drained of its color and camp. Van der Auwera’s VideoSculpture XX emerges as both an image and image-hunter, surveying from the sniper tower.
This work was shown in the exhibition Au-delà du réel? at CENT-QUATRE during the Biennale Némo from October 9, 2021 to January 9, 2022. The piece was previously shown at the First Jinan International Biennial in Shandong, China (2020), at the WIELS Centre for Contemporary Art, Brussels, Belgium (2019) and at 214 Projects, Dallas, USA (2019). An edition is in the collection of the Dallas Museum of Art.
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Van der Auwera's VideoSculptures take a new position to explore the intersections of digital and physical life and how the filtering of images in production, dissemination, and digestion alter both individual perception and consensual experience. Using the screen as sculptural material, these works break images out of the frame in a low-tech manner. They start with an act of destruction as the artist literally takes a knife to a screen to carve away physical layers. Unbeknown to most, these layers are filters that are adhered to every LCD screen. Without the mediation of these filters, images become impossible to see with the naked eye and white noise fills the space.In a second step, the removed filters are placed on tripods between the screens, which makes the images visible, but only as fragments. In this sense, the act of looking becomes a physical activity where the body and effort of the viewer are essential to seeing. One must change their position to see different angles of the story playing out before them. These sculptures create a field of view where the image appears in the horizon between the viewer and the screen, subverting the process of perception and breaking the standard suspension of disbelief to give control back to the viewer.
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Through an assemblage of contrasting self-presentations, Van der Auwera reveals mechanisms by which social media transforms how we apprehend and grieve, or don’t, a sort of violence that is nearing ubiquity.
- Amanda Saroff, Emmanuel Van der Auwera, Artforum
In addition to VideoSculptures and new works, Van der Auwera ipresents important pieces from the past years, including Wake Me Up at 4:20 previously shown at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Ostend (Mu.Zee) and the WIELS Centre for Contemporary Art as well as the installation version of his film The Sky is on Fire, which was the object of a solo exhibition at the Botanique museum in Brussels in 2019. While the film can be viewed on a screen, it also exists splayed across three LED walls, as seen below.
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The Sky is on FIre
HD video 4:1, 15 mins 21 secsThe Sky Is on Fire is a large-scale, 3-channel LED video installation. A slow, constant camera pan captures a setting of what seems at first to be an idyllic American suburb, subtly transformed to reveal its dystopian urban quality. Made in the wake of the tragedy of the Parkland school massacre in Florida in 2018, Van der Auwera’s digital processing of documentary photographs and 3D scans of real places, deconstructs spaces and images to create an uncanny imaginary landscape of a highly evocative quality. The artist’s distortions deliberately recall real places and events. In voice-over, a young man provides a monologue on how technology will outlast, preserve and save us. The promise of technology’s salvation is set against a virtual, constructed visual world. It is precisely the subtlety of transformation that causes The Sky Is on Fire to be so riveting.
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Emmanuel Van der Auwera: HEK Basel - Seeing is Revealing, solo exhibition
Past viewing_room
