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ARTIST INTERVENTION
Els Opsomer
ArtBrussels 2009
24 April 2009 - 27 April 2009
Opening 23 April 2009, 12am to 10pm
ELS OPSOMER, Archive Building 9, 1995-2001/2009, 6 photographs, silver prints on Dibond
Courtesy the Artist and Erna Hécey Gallery, Brussels
Erna Hecey Gallery is pleased to announce the special project of Els Opsomer at
Art Brussels 2009 from 24 through 27 April 2009.
In 2009 Els Opsomer begins to work at Archive
Building, a project that assembles the archive
of photographs, negatives and other materials
from 1987 to the present. During the course
of her entire career, Opsomer has made
works informed by her experiences in the
places she visits. She has taken thousands of
photographs, which form a backdrop to her
artistic productions. It is a work in progress and
contains more than thousands of images to date.
It includes photographs of cities and places
visited by the artist. From New York, Sao Paulo,
Beijing, Lanzhou to Baku, Prague and Madrid.
It contains cityscapes, window-shops, roads,
nature, war zones, etc. The images closely
parallel, year-by-year, they are the subjects
of Opsomer’s work and reveal the orderly but
open-ended analysis central to her work.
The exhibition Archive Building is a collection of
1.000 medium-format photographs displayed.
It is comprised of photographs taken by the
artist over the last 20-years, an encyclopedic
collection of images of various urban
landscapes Opsomer has traveled through.
The photographs include buildings–as well as
seemingly banal images of city streets, gardens,
and apartment buildings. Arranged into groups
of six to nine, each picture is afforded equal
importance.
The photographs are grouped together in
approximately two hundred separate groups.
Cluster of images played off one another, more
associatively than normatively for instance,
urban skylines leading into the night. The result
is a kind of Mobius sky and ground, city and
country, human and animal, motion and stasis.
Archive Building is structured around an
eminently practical structure; perfect for
displaying a vast archive of images. It is
complex, evocative as well as a visual history
of where the artist has been and what she has
seen, a highway of images. This never-ending
work angles off into the distance, into a filmstrip,
into the ongoing nature of our lives as being
filmstrips. Projecting distanced places, past
events into the gallery.
The artist is primarily concerned with the
recording of reality as can be observed from
process, changes through time. A seemingly
exhaustive archive recording, the starting
point from which the art of Opsomer began to
unfold, as many of the recurring themes and
elements of the artist’s work is already present
in her archive. The exhibition Archive Building
(and its accompanying publication) serves as
a compendium of her artistic practice during
twenty years organized around themes of the
city; it explores the nuances and limits of that
theme through its numerous variations.
Much of Opsomer’s work travels in and through
the changing nature of cities, not just the places
itself but the slow fainting and disappearing
both of modern ideals and ongoing conflicts.
With her photographs she explores the content
of these picture stories, their significance, their
means of communication, and investigating
how all these elements overlap and steal from
one another. Therefore the exhibition, which
focuses on Opsomer working methods, reveals
how Opsomer benefits intellectually from an
incessant photographic production as a global
traveler.
The Archive Building echoes with Opsomer’s
most notable film installations. As an archive
of photographs they are incomplete stories,
they are like the very opposite of Opsomer’s
film installations, imbued with ambiguity and
mystery. Whiles the films open up a box of
questions about what it means to be suggestive
stories of our world, the individual photographs
show the images from her travel trips and other
parts of Opsomer’s visual inventory were on
which the films are based.
Barbara Vanderlinden
ARTBUSSELS 2009
Hall 1 Stand 3B 13
24 April 2009 - 27 April 2009
Opening 23 April 2009, 12am to 10pm
WORKS BY
Eleanor Antin, Peter Downsbrough, Lili Dujourie, Peter Friedl, Jef Geys,
Johan Grimonprez, Suzanne Lafont, Pierre-Pol Lecouturier, Olivier Millagou,
John Murphy, Olaf Nicolai, Tom Sanford, Klaus Scherübel, Laurie Simmons, Beat Streuli, Nicole Tran Ba Vang, Jan Van Imschoot
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