Chambre d'Amis | Dallas - Edition 2 - Emmanuel Van der Auwera | 28 - 28 April 2025

Chambre d'Amis II, Dallas x Emmanuel Van der Auwera

In Chambre d'Amis: Dallas Edition 2, Emmanuel Van der Auwera and Lucia Simek (Executive Director, Dallas Contemporary) spoke about the emotional currency of images and the assembly of the real, discussing a range of subjects from rare earth minerals to various forms of automation.

The following viewing room includes documentation of this event, as well as a presentation of the works discussed.

Thank you to Peter, Brad, Lucia, Tammy and everybody who turned up for a fantastic second edition of Chambre d’Amis (Dallas), hosted at the Augustus Owen Foundation.

ABOUT Emmanuel Van der Auwera

Emmanuel Van der Auwera (b. 1982) lives and works in Brussels, Belgium.

Whether through filmmaking, VideoSculpture, theater, printmaking, or other media, Emmanuel Van der Auwera takes us straight to the core of the image, questioning our visual literacy: How do images of contemporary mass media operate on various publics and to what end? How do existing codes and conventions shape the framing of events and their entry in our collective memory? While bringing us no closer to a monolithic truth, Van der Auwera constructs new paradigms for reading images and understanding our relationships with them. His fascination with the deconstruction of the technologies of seeing stems from his investigations into the ethics of the gaze. A turning point in his practice, in 2012, he started to make works that responded to what he saw as ‘a shift in paradigm’ fuelled by the growth of social media, and to interrogate the relationship between the currency of the image and the ‘currency of emotions within the image’. In this new visual economy, the spectator has also become the spectacle, trading on the authenticity of their experience and our sublime fascination with things that terrify, disgust or enrapture us. His process of creating an engaging visual experience that pulls the viewer out of their passivity, demonstrates the risk of further transforming reality into a simulation. Following Susan Sontag, these representations are a means of making ‘real’ (or ‘more real’) matters that the privileged and the merely safe might prefer to ignore. Van der Auwera’s work reflects upon these chains of production and consumption, and the responsibility inherent in the act of seeing.
BIO

Van der Auwera is a 2015 laureate of the Higher Institute for Fine Arts (HISK) post-academic course in Ghent (BE), a 2015 Langui Award recipient of the Young Belgian Art Prize, and the first winner of the Goldwasserschenking awarded by the WIELS Contemporary Art Centre and the Belgian Royal Museums of Fine Arts (BE). His work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at institutions including HEK - Haus der Elektronischen Künste (Basel, CH); Photoforum Pasquart (Biel, CH); IKOB - Museum of Contemporary Art (Eupen, BE); Le Botanique (Brussels, BE); CAP - Centre d’Art Contemporain de Saint Fons (Lyon, FR). Van der Auwera has participated in group exhibitions at the Palais de Tokyo (Paris, FR); Pinakothek der Moderne (Munich, DE); KW Institute for Contemporary Art (Berlin, DE); WIELS Contemporary Art Centre (Brussels, BE); Kunsthal Charlottenborg (Copenhagen, DK); Deichtorhallen Hamburg (Hamburg, DE); Galerie Rudolfinum (Prague, CK); 8th Yokohama Triennale (Yokohama, JP); Centre Wallonie-Bruxelles (Paris, FR); Kunsthalle Wien (Vienna, AT); Jeu de Paume (Paris, FR); and many others.

His work has been acquired by the MAC's - The Wallonia-Brussels Federation Museum of Contemporary Arts (Grand-Hornu, BE); ARGOS centre for audiovisual arts (Brussels, BE); Musée d’Ixelles (Brussels, BE); Mu.ZEE (Ostend, BE); Collection de la Province de Hainaut - BPS 22 (Charleroi, BE); KANAL - Centre Pompidou (Brussels, BE); KADIST (Paris, FR); Fundación Otazu (Pamplona, ES); the Stockholm School of Economics (Stockholm, SE); the Art Vontobel Collection (Zurich, CH); the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art (Eugene, US); and Dallas Museum of Art (Dallas, US). In 2020, Yale University Press & Mercator Fonds published a monograph dedicated to his work.
Talk with Lucia Simek, Executive Director at the Dallas Contemporary

In collaboration with Dallas Contemporary and the Augustus Owen Foundation.

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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 sec. Dimensions variable

‘A few years ago, there was only the medium of the camera and of cinema. As of now, with the internet and the smartphones, there is a fragmentation of the media. It is for that reason that I use a lot of screens: they are windows onto our reality’

In Emmanuel Van der Auwera’s VideoSculptures, the screen and related hardware become sculptural material. VideoSculpture XX (The World's 6th Sense), consists of six manipulated screens: to the naked eye, they yield nothing but white light; when looking through ten plexiglass plates, scattered throughout the space, the images are revealed. The fragmented video is assembled from thermal camera imagery, which is usually used in a military, security or medical context. Here, the military thermal cameras are not directed at enemies, real or imagined, but on the population of Las Vegas. This footage was taken by the camera makers as promotional material for their spyware. With it, they erect another reality, a portrait of a city emptied of its colours and of its pomp.
VideoSculpture XXX (The Gospel), 2024

Video installation with sound, 17 min 53 sec, 8 flat screens, glass, MDF, metal, 341 x 279 x 242 cm - 134 1/4 x 109 7/8 x 95 1/4 in

Emmanuel Van der Auwera’s VideoSculpture XXX (The Gospel) first appeared at the Centre d’Art Contemporain (Genève, CH) in 2024, before traveling to the Kunstverein in Hamburg (DE). “The sculptural video installation VideoSculpture XXX (The Gospel) (2024) consists of a vertical monitor of white light and a horizontal, reflective floor surface: Only in the depths of the monolithic, black glass does the video piece become visible.

Thematically, the work is made up of three levels which share the common concern of exploring the foundations and consequences of artificial intelligence (AI): firstly, accounts from a Chinese worker at a secret Bayan-Obo mine for ‘rare soils’; secondly, fragments of conversations with Caryn, the first AI girlfriend, which was launched in spring 2023; and thirdly, news reports about Gospel, an AI-based military target recognition software. The different levels of the work converge in the question of the material, digital, and imaginary conditions of the production of reality.

VideoSculpture XXX (The Gospel) illuminates the connection between the extraction of so-called ‘rare soils’, which form the basis of the digital revolution and AI, and tells of the global entanglements of neo-extractivism in order to link it to a global, digital economy that extends to the latest developments of deep learning algorithms in warfare. All of the video and sound material in the artwork, with the exception of the song at the very end, is generated with the help of AI.

Van der Auwera uses AI as a conceptual starting point and narrative tool. Using posts found on the Chinese social media platform Douyin, the artist takes reports of a Chinese mine worker and translates them into audio-visual form using AI. The resulting video material allows personal impressions into life underground, which shift between speculation and documentation. Image-generating AI creates a new reality in images that can no longer be distinguished from traditional recordings; as a result, AI both unsettles the reality of images while at the same time allowing for new, speculative insights into previously hidden worlds.”

Text by Dr. Martin Karcher for the exhibition "In and Out of Place. Land after Information 1992– 2024", Kunstverein in Hamburg, 2024.
White Cloud / 白云

Emmanuel Van der Auwera’s film investigates mysterious white clouds, the promises of communication technologies, and the lives of laborers in a secret mine at Bayan-Obo, whose work helps us see the world and yet remains outside of the visible grid. White Cloud / 白云 is an emotional speculative documentary that offers one of the first looks into an equally mysterious and influential Rare Earth Element mining district. While questions related to geopolitics, ecology, capitalism, conspiracy and future scenarios circulate around the film, at the core is the testimony of a lonely miner attempting to embrace a dark and desolate landscape in search of a better tomorrow. Using generative audio and visual tools, Van der Auwera looks into the deep underbelly of these technologies and the rarely spoken relationship between the earth’s bowels and humanity’s outer space dreams. The film has an uncanny, slightly grotesque feel as emerging AI technologies show their own flaws. It was not despite, but exactly because of these flaws that Van der Auwera was driven towards the utilization of these tools. With the rapid evolution of this technology, this distorted aesthetic is disappearing, leaving us with an illusion of reality where what doesn’t exist is indiscernible from what does. And herein perhaps lies the artist’s focus, providing us with critical resources to read the physical world as it vanishes before our eyes.

Honorable Mention at Vienna Shorts Film Festival 2024.

Best Documentary at the 14th Cyprus International Short Film Festival.
Memento

The Memento series builds on the artist's fascination for the mediatized representation of events that shift public consciousness. How do events like these write themselves into collective memory and wherein lies the common imagination for the future?

The series began in 2016 as a collaboration with technicians in a newspaper production plant. At that time, works were created using images that had appeared in the paper and using the paper's offset plates and imaging equipment to create layered exposures activated by light refractions. Over time, more liberties were taken with the process. Plates were mounted together. Images were enlarged. They were also eventually selected from niche digital media and imposed into the newspaper format. Ink was rolled across them with the paper's rotary press. The work Memento 32 (Capitol Red) is the second in the series to mark the end of a president's term, with a 21st century spin on paintings of political events like those by Delacroix, Goya or Rubens. Instead of painting with oil however, Van der Auwera hijacks the vocabulary and mechanized processes of mass media.
Memento
Memento 58 (NOAH WAS REAL), 2024

Memento 58 (NOAH WAS REAL), 2024

Newspaper .3mm aluminum offset plates mounted on aluminum frame

275 x 302.5 x 2.5 cm
108 1/4 x 119 1/8 x 1 in

As light strikes the six panels, the image flickers in and out of view. These reflective metal surfaces—offset printing plates—have been diverted from their original industrial purpose and reimagined by Emmanuel Van der Auwera as part of Memento, a series spanning nearly a decade (2016–2025). In his hands, tools of mass reproduction become unique works of art: the plates, typically hidden within the newspaper-printing process, are transformed into luminous, painterly surfaces that explore light and depth.

Over the years, Van der Auwera has pushed the boundaries of this medium, manipulating solvents to darken the plates or exposing them to bleach images almost into absence. Of the 63 works in the Memento series, Memento 58 (NOAH WAS REAL) stands alone in bringing together all of these formal techniques—a culmination that insists on the idea of repetition and return.

The panels feature a 2022 Globe Magazine cover: a smiling child beneath the headline, “NOAH WAS REAL.” The text is always legible; the child’s image emerges only under certain light, often revealed through his eyes, from which the rest of his face must be reconstructed. His name is Noah Pozner, the youngest victim of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting. The photograph is his final yearbook portrait.

The Globe article reflects on the Pozner family’s grief a decade after the tragedy—years shadowed by toxic conspiracy theories: that the grieving parents were actors, that Noah never existed, that the massacre was a hoax orchestrated by the so-called Deep State. These lies proliferated online, driven by alt-right figures like Alex Jones. At one point, Noah’s father, Leonard Pozner, was forced into hiding.

Van der Auwera sees Sandy Hook as a critical rupture in the relationship between media and public trust—a moment when the cracks in traditional journalism became unmistakable. It marks, in his view, the beginning of the post-truth era. Nearly 13 years later, Memento 58 (NOAH WAS REAL) measures the emotional and cultural aftermath of that moment, closing the Memento series as offset printing itself fades into obsolescence; the newspaper plant where Van der Auwera once worked has since shut down.

“The manner in which human sense perception is organized, the medium in which it is accomplished, is determined not only by nature but by historical circumstances as well.” In the delicate interplay of light and absence, Van der Auwera’s repetition of “NOAH WAS REAL” stands as a powerful tribute to the young boy whose life was stolen, a defiant rejection of the lies that sought to erase him, and a reminder that truth, despite its distortions, endures.

1. Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”, 1935, p.5
Thank you for joining us.
Photography by Exploredinary.