Emmanuel Van der Auwera’s 'Memento' series takes as its subject the image of the crowd, sourced from newspapers around the world. The crowd has become a marker for large-scale news events: mass crisis and tragedy, rising activism, and shifts in the socio-political landscape. Initially intrigued by the aesthetics of grief and portrayal of collective catastrophe, Van der Auwera turns our attention to the witnesses of these stories, who, through their stares, never articulate the nature of their concern. Like the pictured crowd, we look towards something that isn’t actually there and are reminded that ‘seeing’ through the media is an active task. This is something the works, made at the newspaper production plant in Belgium on the paper’s aluminum offset plates, demonstrate as images are revealed through movement and close inspection.

Through filmmaking, video, printmaking, and sculpture, Van der Auwera sets up encounters with found images that provoke a questioning of our visual literacy: How do images of contemporary mass media operate on various publics and to what end? The artist analyses how images are engineered, intervening on their function. In so doing, Van der Auwera brings us no closer to a monolithic truth, but constructs new paradigms for reading images and understanding our relationships with them.

Van der Auwera is a 2015 Laureate of the Higher Institute for Fine Arts (HISK) post-academic course in Ghent, a 2015 Langui Award recipient of the Young Belgian Art Prize, and the first winner of the Goldwasserschenking awarded by WIELS and the Belgian Royal Museums of Fine Art. His work has recently been featured in exhibitions at WIELS Brussels, BE; Centre Pompidou, Paris, FR; Palais de Tokyo, Paris, FR; Centro per l'Arte Contemporanea Luigi Pecci, Prato, IT; Ars Electronica, Linz, AT; Casino Luxembourg - Forum d'art Contemporain, Luxembourg City, LU, among others. His work has been acquired by the Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, TX, US; KANAL - Centre Pompidou, Brussels, BE; Mu.ZEE, Ostend, BE; Fundación Otazu, Pamplona, ES; Collection de la Province de Hainaut - BPS22, Charleroi, BE; the National Bank of Belgium, Brussels, BE; and the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art, Eugene, OR, US. In 2022 Van der Auwera will have a solo exhibition at the House of Electronic Arts, Basel, CH. Emmanuel Van der Auwera lives and works in Brussels, Belgium.