Paul Kuimet works with photographs, space and moving images. His exhibitions often include montages of digital images displayed over lightboxes in darkened rooms, which heightens the viewers’ relationships to both the physical and the pictorial space. For this exhibition, Kuimet has developed themes from his previous works, including the dichotomies between the natural and the cultivated, depictions of modern “non-places” and objects that represented utopian belief in modern technological progress during the Cold War, but also had (and perhaps still have) dystopian qualities. The three new works created for this exhibition are all studies of how to depict movement using still images and how to use moving images to depict stillness.
The photographic installation Late Afternoon consists of two lightboxes installed so as to suggest that the focal planes of the images react to the viewers’ movement in the exhibition space. The work looks closely at the design of an environment that might have once been influenced by Modernist ideals but that now offers nothing more than a space bathed in melancholic afternoon sunlight.
The 16mm film Still Life can be seen as a companion to Late Afternoon, though while the spatial relationship between the viewers and the image is emphasised in the photographic work, time and temporality are the focus of the film. The main emphasis of Still Life is the technological determinacy of analogue film projection – the constant movement of the film itself – that here attempts to create a new kind of tension between stillness and movement.
The final work in the exhibition, Perspective Study, was photographed “on location” but, as the images on the glass panels on the facade of a building are, in fact, digital compositions of reflections from several different vantage points, the photographs represent “non-existent” perspectives. Since the reflected compositions are the glimpses from different vantage points one would see while walking past the facade, the photographs could also be said to describe movement. The shaping of the lightbox to fit the perspective created by the camera angle attempts to both immerse viewers in, as well as alienate them from, pictorial depth. The architecture of the installation allows both images to be seen at the same time, thus making apparent the disruption of perspectival space, which in turn raises doubts about the viewers’ own positions in relation to the images and the depiction of a well-known Modernist building.
Translation: Chris Bourne
The exhibition is part of the Artists in Residence in Brussels programme, which Contretype started in 1997, and which continues in partnership with the Wallonie-Brussels Federation and the Francophone Community Commission (COCOF).
PAUL KUIMET
13/04 – 5/06/16
Contretype
Cité Fontainas, 4A
Fontainashof, 4A
1060 Saint-Gilles – Sint-Gillis
T. + 32 (0)2 538 42 20 | F. + 32 (0)2 538 99 19
www.contretype.org
