Matière Critique, explorations photographique, ISELP, Brussels (BE), 2024 curated by Maria Papazoglou.
“Since the 1980s, digital technologies have pushed photography towards dematerialisation. Countering the relentless advance, artists have simultaneously committed themselves to fully affirming its physicality. Through eight unique and experimental photographic practices, the exhibition invites us to read these alternative voices as genuine forms showing resistance to a world dominated by the digital.”
The exhibition Matière Critique, Explorations Photographiques, curated by Marie Papazoglou, brings together works by Edith Bories, Lara Gasparotto, Liesbet Grupping, Lucas Leffler, Hélène Petite, Dries Segers, Thomas Vandenberghe, and Laure Winants.
Installation view: Left: Liesbet Grupping, Studio notes (Antwerp), 2021. Middle: Liesbet Grupping, Sea, from the series Matter in progress, 2010. Sea was recorded with a flat movie (4 x 5 inch), without camera. A flat movie is usually used as a movie holder for a technical camera. During the recording of Sea the flat movie was dipped underwater. In this way the slide got directly in contact with the water of the North Sea.
Evaporating picture (sea) 2010, 2024. is a projection of a slide filled with seawater. The heat of the projector makes the image evolve almost unnoticeably: the water slowly creates air bubbles that progressively blend together. Leaving only a bundle of light and sea salt.
Zomerboek, 2022 is an artist’s book and consists of photographic reproductions of cyanotypes made in the shadow of the garden. Between these reproductions, I inserted folded photocopies of excerpts from the books I read that summer.
Installation view: Sea (rain) from the series Matter In Progress, 2010, 2024. Untitled (Saint-Martial, FR) (1), from the series bleu, blue, blauw, blau, mėlyna, 2017, 2024. Untitled (Beauregard, FR) (test), from the series bleu, blue, blauw, blau, mėlyna, 2017, 2024. Untitled (Puy-de-Dôme, FR) (4), from the series bleu, blue, blauw, blau, mėlyna, 2017, 2024.
detail: Sea (rain) from the series Matter In Progress, 2010, 2024. Sea (rain) shows a photograph of the sea taken on the Belgian coast, on a slide with a technical camera. After taking the picture, I hung the slide out of the window for several weeks. I wondered how sun, rain, wind, temperature and humidity would affect the emulsion and thus the image.
detail: Untitled (Saint-Martial, FR) (1), from the series bleu, blue, blauw, blau, mèlyna, 2017, 2024.
Triggered by the failure of colour in the photographic process, I had the idea of capturing time in colours. I set to work and turned my camera towards the (blue) sky for the series bleu, blue, blauw, blau, mèlyna. The sky as a natural scene and subject contains all the necessary components for this series – time, light and space. In Untitled (Saint-Martial, FR) (1) the light is blocked when the shutter is opened, bringing together different situations and/or moments in one image. I use 8 minutes and 19 seconds as a benchmark for the interval between different exposure times. This is the time it takes for sunlight to reach us. It is from the sunlight that does not reach us that we perceive the sky as blue.
