Wednesday 30 January | Emmanuel Van der Auwera's lecture took place in conjunction with the group exhibition, We are the people. Who are you?, in which two of the artist’s recent works are included.
Emmanuel spoke about his current practice, which incorporates filmmaking, video sculpture and printmaking, exploring the topics of reality vs. simulation, desensitization to violence, communication and the framing of messages, and society’s recording and responding to catastrophic events.
Van der Auwera’s work sets up encounters with images that provoke a questioning of our visual literacy: How do images of contemporary mass media operate on various publics, and to what end? With the formal rigor of a logician, the artist dissects the structure of images; researching how they are engineered, mastering specialized industry techniques, and intervening on their protocol. In so doing, Van der Auwera brings us no closer to a monolithic truth of images, but constructs new paradigms for reading and understanding our relationship to them.
Van der Auwera is a 2015 Laureate of the Higher Institute for Fine Arts (HISK) post-academic course in Ghent and a 2015 Langui Award recipient of the Young Belgian Art Prize. His work has recently been featured in exhibitions at WIELS (Brussels, Belgium), The Centre Pompidou (Paris, France), Palais de Tokyo (Paris, France), Centro per l’Arte Contemporanea Luigi Pecci (Prato, Italy), Ars Electronica (Linz, Austria), Casino Luxembourg - Forum d'art contemporain (Luxembourg City, Luxembourg), and Mu.ZEE (Ostend, Belgium), among others. In 2018, his work was acquired by KANAL Centre - Pompidou (Brussels, Belgium), Mu.ZEE (Ostend, Belgium) and the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art (Eugene, OR, USA). Van der Auwera’s forthcoming exhibition White Noise at 214 Projects (Dallas, Texas) is his first solo presentation in the United States, followed by exhibitions at the Everson Museum of Art (Syracuse, NY, USA) and Botanique (Brussels, Belgium) in 2019. Edel Assanti will present the artist’s first UK solo exhibition in 2020. Emmanuel Van der Auwera is represented by Harlan Levey Projects, Brussels, Belgium.
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'We are the people. Who are you?' was on view at Edel Assanti through 9 March 2019.