David Claerbout is one of the leading Belgian video artists on the international stage. Alongside Tacita Dean, Douglas Gordon, Stan Douglas and Thomas Demand, he belongs to a generation of artists who critically explore the meaning of the cinematic and photographic image in contemporary art. The generation gained traction in the 1990s, at the start of the digital revolution.
Claerbout studied painting and graphics in Ghent. Although considerably skilled in these fields, he did not succeed in developing his own visual language. In 1994, he made the radical decision to stop developing his own creations and to work exclusively with found images. In around 1995, he used digital techniques to subtly transform archival photos into photo-videos with barely perceptible moving elements. By creating movement within these otherwise silent photographic witnesses to history, Claerbout imbues them with “the certainty of progress, of the present”. The duality between stasis and movement, and between past and present, typifies many of his early works.
Claerbout started to manipulate film footage in the opposite direction in the early 2000s, thereby lending it a more photographic character. For example, he slowed down the footage to an extreme extent, or filmed the actual passage of time in a specific place. Claerbout creates powerfully atmospheric, photographic and cinematic images that explore the inherent features of the respective mediums. Through his pronounced focus on the intrinsic characteristics of both the photographic and cinematic image, Claerbout is one of the few artists who succeeds in merging the two media. He confronts us with the possibility of photos that unfold in time but are not a film, as well as with the possibility of films that are stilled in time but are not photos.
