David Claerbout

Although originally trained as a painter, Claerbout (1969) became more and more interested in the concept of time throughout his career. By investigating the nature of photography and film his oeuvre now exists at the intersection of photography, film and digital technology. He often uses digital tools to manipulate still and moving imagery to suggest an otherworldly level of existence. Something that might refer to a specific place or event, but of which the timeline is not clear, oscillating between past and present. The motive of his latest computer animated work the “confetti” piece is a single moment in time taken from an event that looks like a local election celebration in the United States. Thousands of confetti are falling from the sky, as guests are starting to clap their hands. The falling confetti, tumbling down gently like transparent flower petals seem to be an index of lightness. "My images are mere frameworks in which another image is suspended, they never show what it is about. More important are the silent transformations that happen by the passage of time. I have sometimes said that I sculpt in duration, depending on trusted phenomena such as light, shadows and wind, surfaces such as water, ice, oil or anything that can reside in memory, and that can be summoned back from memory in a spontaneous manner. I avoid dialogue. I avoid sound - since this can only be manifest in the here and now. I think it is important to allow the viewer in time to settle in the exhibition space, which is, since the inception of the bourgeois museum, a place into which you stumble and stroll. You are not called there by duty. Following that initial settling in I like to 'lose' my visitor, this is easily achieved by lack of events or spectacle within my images. Only when I have lost his attention, can the viewer set his mind on something else than that of a movie-goer. That is when my pictures begin." - David Claerbout (excerpt from an interview in Aesthetica magazine, 2016)