David Claerbout
dal 20/3/2013 al 15/6/2013
Segnalato da
20/3/2013
David Claerbout
Kunsthalle Mainz, Mainz
The exhibition features selected films of the past years. Time and its perception are central to Claerbout's oeuvre. The Belgian artist has been exploring the boundaries between the stationary and the moving picture since 1996. His videos stretch narrative and action to create a more intensive sense of duration.
The initial impression is one of a picturesque mood and a frozen calm. Images of a section of coastline in Brittany have been rendered here in a richly tonal black and white. It is summer; the tide is out. People are watching a group of children in the shallow water. The gloomy photos are reminiscent of favourite Impressionist motifs. At the same time, however, they line up in rhythmic progression, their perspectives and vantage points changing as if to develop a sense of time and narrative. We experience succession although just a single instant is shown. The latter is only deciphered for us at the end by a close-up: of a boy in the act of thrusting both hands into the water, shattering the smoothness, quiet, and calm.
Time and its perception are central to David Claerbout’s œuvre. The Belgian artist has been exploring the boundaries between the stationary and the moving picture since 1996. Claerbout’s videos stretch narrative and action to create a more intensive sense of duration. The typical scarcity of motion in his images and the merging of past, present and future together result in a pictorial experience of great density and reflexivity as well as the utmost sustainability. The concentration on a phenomenology of the image becomes manifest with the aid of these two methods both resulting in deceleration. At times, Claerbout’s films are slowed down to such a degree that episodes of everyday life become frozen in aestheticall still lifes. In other cases, photos are serialized by means of digital multiple exposures in such a way that – through the choice of almost identical subjects – the recording of a single instant is melting away to a moving condition. Both methods are borne by a search for silence and concentration of mood. The atmospheric intensity and the pictorial subsequence of the visual experience are characteristic of Claerbout.
An Asian family is seen playing ball in the back courtyard of a highrise complex. Sections of a Happy Moment is accompanied by a softly undulating soundtrack. Though the images follow one another in slide-show manner, they capture only one split second. It is the second referred to in German as “fruchtbar” (“seminal”): the ball at the apex of its trajectory, virtually riveted there by the upward gazes of young and old alike. Playful negotiation with vibrant motion and the gentle synchronization of images Claerbout performs create a carefree quality which nevertheless exposes the prerequisites of perception: the habits of sight, the susceptibility of expectation, the visual precision of attentiveness, and the after-effect of memory.
The Kunsthalle Mainz is staging a solo exhibition of the Belgian artist’s work, featuring selected films of the past years. It will also present to the audience in Mainz a work never before shown to the public: the video portrays workers leaving a factory in Nigeria at the end of their shift. In the title and subject, Claerbout makes reference to the first film by the Lumière brothers. He shares the Lumières’ fascination with the experience of time and movement. Yet unlike those pioneers of the film medium he is concerned not with the depiction of human beings in movement, but above all with the play of light, reflections in oil and water, and the labour situation in Nigeria.
David Claerbout (born 1969) lives and works in Antwerp, Belgium. He has participated in a large number of group exhibitions, and solo exhibitions of his work have been presented, amongst others, at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, the Wiels in Brussels, the Secession in Vienna, the Munich Pinakothek der Moderne, the MIT List Visual Arts Center in Cambridge (MA), the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, the Muséesroyaux des Beaux-Art in Brussels, the Berlin Akademie der Künste, the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven, the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam, the Kunstverein Hannover, and the New York Dia Center for the Arts.
In addition to publications on the artists featured at the Kunsthalle Mainz, we offer a selection of publications of other institutions for sale in our shop. They can be purchased at the cashier's desk throughout the Kunsthalle opening hours.
The editions, publications, posters and postcards put out by the Kunsthalle Mainz are likewise available at the cashier's desk whenever the Kunsthalle Mainz is open. We will also be happy to mail them to you for an extra packing and shipping fee.
Image: David Claerbout, Oil workers (of the Shell company of Nigeria) returning home from work, caught in torrential rain, 2013,
HD colour animation, silent, duration endless. Courtesy the artist and galleries Micheline Szwajcer, Yvon Lambert, Hauser & Wirth © VG Bild-Kunst 2013
Opening 3/21/2013, 7 pm
Kunsthalle Mainz
Am Zollhafen 3–5 55118 Mainz
Opening hours:
Tuesday, Thursday, Friday 10 am to 5 pm
Wednesday 10 am to 9 pm
Saturday and Sunday 11 am to 5 pm
Entrance fees:
Adults € 5
Reductions (pupils, students, OAPs, severely disabled persons) € 2
Groups of 10 adults upwards (per person) € 3.50
Groups of 10 upwards reduced (per person) € 1.50
Children up to 6 years free admission
Annual season ticket € 25