Joelle Dubois paints and illustrates. With a wink, she brings the digital revolution and the resulting role of mankind in our modern society to the fore in her works. The artist from Ghent is particularly interested in the voyeuristic aspect of digitisation. Social media like Instagram, Snapchat or Youtube and television programmes like Big Brother or Temptation Island fulfil our desire to anonymously observe others in their suffering, their love lives, their failures and also their successes. Digitalisation has made communication faster, more focused and more interactive. However, this is also accompanied by the fact that less and less privacy is possible, and that people present themselves to others more openly and blithely. In fact, communication is becoming increasingly superficial, impersonal and anonymous. Dubois passionately devotes herself to this complex of subjects in an ironic and comical manner. She portrays her protagonists in an exposed and unadorned manner, imbued with a drastic realism that often proves very distorted and untrue in the digital world. By showing hairy, obese women and men in compromising positions, she emphasises her own strong role as an independent and emancipated woman and artist. Nevertheless, Dubois herself is a silent observer, viewing the world in her own display of idiosyncratic perfectionism.
- Sylvia Rehbein (Thomas Rehbein Gallery)
15:00 - 16:00
Thomas Vandenberghe (°1985, Ghent) is a Belgian photographer. He makes small intimate images, usually with flash, so that they almost seem like snapshots. His silver gelatin prints, often repeated, faded or torn, all bear witness to a process of processing.
If for Vandenberghe the act of photographing has to do with desire, the equally important act of printing focuses on memory. The need not only to look at, but also to reconcile oneself with what once was, but perhaps even more with what could have been - but is not and never will be. Repeated, faded or even torn, scratched or cut, his gelatin silver prints bear the poignant evidence of an ongoing process of feelings and reactions, or perhaps even a conclusion reached. Each of Vandenberghe's printed photos contains the drama of what one hopes and desires - an imagined truth - and what ultimately remains. They are the lingering, emotionally charged and, in the course of time, distorted evidence of a reality with which we now have to live.
Price: 5 euro
In Dutch.
Make your reservation via info@vriendensmak.be. Cancellations from 3 weeks before date will not be refunded.
