David Claerbout

Explores some of the most innovative attempts by contemporary artists, filmmakers, architects etc to explore multiple Temporalities and to counter the uniform sense of time promoted by our technology-driven society.

A photograph of a tomb sculpture of a young angel with a copper rose in his hand. Reanimating the copper rose lends this abandoned sculpture a new liveliness. This work is a comment on photography and its magic.

Biological programming, still existent in today’s living beings, prompts a reflex to stay away from fire if it cannot be contained, such as in the case of a wildfire. A ‘meditation on fire’ may therefore sound like a contradiction. Inspired by the inquiry in the amount of power needed to produce a digital “still life” of fire, a task likely to set the computer system on fire, Wildfire confronts the biological and the digital. Prolonged shots of silenced fire comply with the notion of biological breathing time, while the abstract nature of the burning fire serves as a metaphor for the technological abstraction linked to its making, hinting at the increasingly abstract world we live in. In Wildfire (meditation of fire) the camera has been removed and disintegrated into a numerical system of binary codes. We are confronted with an illusion of an image, a hallucination, a visual construct of computing. These images offer an immersive experience of the otherwise un-experienceable.

‘With Bordeaux Piece I have for the first time written dialogues, with the help of the actor Josse de Pauw, who plays the role of the father. Each shot lasts between two and three minutes, and there are seven shots forming the story, a bit like in a fiction short. The plot did not matter to me; I needed a succession of photographs, quickly seen situations, and I chose the story of Le Mépris by Jean-Luc Godard. It could have been a different story.

This work shows the image of a postcard dating from the early 20th century. On a country road two men are standing near a gigantic tree. In the distance we can see a mill and the outline of a village. At first glance there is nothing that seems strange in this pastoral and picturesque tableau. But when you look closer you notice the leaves of the tree softly moving in the wind.

Lasting over thirteen hours, Claerbout's film shows two men engaged in a discussion against the back-drop of a neoclassical house in southern France. An act of violence is repeated and re-enacted more than seventy times over the course of the film. Dissolving the boundaries between photography and film, Claerbout’s work puts into question the reassuring stillness of photography and the inevitable narrative progress of the cinematic image.

This video is based on a photograph dating from 1932, taken at the opening of the new Antonio Sant’Elia kindergarten in Como, Italy. We see children playing in the school’s functionalist garden (designed by the architect Giuseppe Terragni). The light is cold and it seems as if the sun is low, creating the long shadows of early spring. The image of the children remains in between a spontaneously captured moment and a composed picture. The movement of the young trees suggests that the image is frozen, while it simultaneously continues to melt further into motion, as though undecided in which direction to go.

Cat and Bird in Peace is a real-time recording of a cat and a bird sitting in a cage. Nothing happens, however...from time to time the bird looks to the left and then to the right, and the cat sometimes looks up. The animals seem to ignore one another. In contrast to what one would expect there is no element of suspense in this normally dangerous situation.

The image shows a large, splendid tree standing in a green field, filmed on a summer’s day. The leaves move in the wind and the sun’s rays glide over the tree. After a moment of contemplation it seems to the viewer as if the tree is performing a kind of theatrical dance that contrasts moments of sunshine and shade.

‘Four Persons Standing' is based on an appropriated image, which I altered slightly. It is one of a few works that I made that has sound. The monotonous sound comes from two seconds that I took from a 1980s television series, facilitating a transition between two scenes, with no particular dramatic outcome. I limited movement to the nervous grain of a still from a video. Therefore the projected picture is just a still, and the sound is also a still. But at any moment, the characters - two men and two women - could interrupt the composition and move on with their lives. The picture's elements are dynamically imprisoned in their own composedness. They are on the brink of action, yet they never do; but then again, they could. I tried to make a found picture - lost in a book - act like a photograph.

What if animals stopped behaving like humans? And music was banned from the soundtrack? A non-narrative revisiting of the Disney classic, Jungle Book. To make his own version, the artist painstakingly redrew the frames of the original by hand, one by one, to create a familiar, yet entirely new experience.