In the context of the AON Award 2008, S.M.A.K. will be presenting new work by the Laureate Jasper Rigole (b. 1980).
The artist received this award for Paradise Recollected (2008) – a film he presented with the closely related installation, an elementary taxonomy of collected memory (2008), as his final year project at the Higher Institute for Fine Arts (HISK). Paradise Recollected is a film compiled and distilled from ‘found footage’ in archive material from the International Institute for the Conservation, Archiving and Distribution of Other People’s Memories (IICAVAH)). This institute, founded on 28th June 1980 by Jasper Rigole, is focused on the memories, found or lost, of others. Concretely, the IICAVAH archive mainly comprises 8mm films that have been found, forgotten and thought to have been lost. The images – mostly amateur recordings of holidays, family celebrations or family outings – were once made ‘to be remembered’ but over the years have found their way to attics, basements, flea markets and so on. Paradise Recollected, an essay of compiled images, brings together memories and merges them into a new parallel world founded on the collective memory of the spectator and thus offers him an escape route to the fantastic ‘land of Cockaigne’.
Jasper Rigole will be presenting new work in the S.M.A.K.. OUTNUMBERED, a brief history of imposture (2009) is a new audiovisual installation which – like Paradise Recollected – comments on the effect of documentaries, ‘fact fiction’ and popular scientific equivalents. Through an encyclopaedic approach and quasi scientific precision the artist examines concepts like authenticity and objectivity. The result is an apparently detailed study of the history of falsification. OUTNUMBERED, a brief history of imposture examines both man’s need for ‘conclusive’ stories and the question whether anecdotes ‘fictionalise’ history.
Since 2006 AON Artscope awards an annual art prize to the value of 5,000 euro to a HISK Laureate. Following Cédric Noël (2006), Cindy Wright (2007) and Filip Vervaet (2008), Jasper Rigole has been awarded the prize for 2009. Rigole now works as researcher at KASK in Ghent. AON Artscope is a branch of AON Belgium, which is specialised in insuring works of art. For more info please go to: www.aon.be
