Images Énervées

audio visual installation

collaboration with photographer Sofie Knijff

First try out edition: 4-channel installation at Les Rencontres d'Arles photo festival
Arles, France. July 3 — Aug. 31, 2017

Second try out edition: 3-channel installation at the Mariane Ibrahim Gallery,
Seattle, USA September 3 — October 13, 2017

Third installment at the Saskia Fernando Gallery
Colombo, Sri Lanka, January 18 — February 7, 2018

For a specific photo series called "Tales", photographer and friend Sofie Knijff invited me to help her create a video installation with sound, based on her portraits. Looking for a way to grasp the playful yet dark content of the photo series, together we set off inventing a new audio-visual language. An unusually tight and elusive connection between photography and film was born.

In a way it reads like a graphic novel, with separate frames simultaneously explored by the camera, in a rather voyeuristic way. Yet the audio composition, the various layers of sound, some of them field-recordings, some out of other worlds, create a perception more like watching film.

These portrayed children live in their own fairy tales. As they pose for the camera, you can see their minds and even their bodies wandering off, into a deeper thought, a private place, a moment in time not far from here.

I try to create a notion of what these private moments and places can be; not by knowing the children's’ thoughts, but by reliving their possible fantasies in my own mind. Going into dark forests, scavenging in the bushes, gazing at the stars, following unknown paths, and, as you go along, trying not to make too much sense of it all.