Installation View, Volta5, Basel

GWENAEL BELANGER| View more works by Gwenael Belanger>

A close, critical observation of what forms a vivid picture in our everyday world is the starting point for Gwenaël Bélanger’s projects. His approach is characterized above all by a “bricoleur” attitude which consists of using graphic and photographic processes. Like an anthropologist of images, he is interested as much in the media image as in the cultural object, both of which carry and convey connotations, denotations and references. What we think or say about the image and the object, and their polysemic content, is more important than their materiality itself. These are the materials he works with, in order to create shifts in perception and in which he sets up what he calls “machinations of the gaze”. Early beginnings of a creative space, a kind of building site, where constructions, manipulations and transformations take place, as he misleadingly plays with the codes of media language. Finally, Bélanger attempts to question the status of the image—how it is produced, transmitted and received—and puts to the test what we see and perceive.

Gwenael Belanger graduated from the Université du Québec in Montréal in 2000. Exhibitions include The Hidden Land, NETTIE HORN, London; Still Revolution (solo), Contact Festival, Toronto Photography Festival, Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art, Toronto, Canada; Le Faux Mouvement (solo), La Bande Vidéo au complexe Méduse, Québec; Poursuivre le hors-champ (solo) , galerie de l’UQAM, Montréal; La Triennale québécoise - Rien ne se perd, rien ne se crée, tout se transforme, Museum of Contemporary Art of Montréal; Décoratif! Décoratif?, travelling exhibition organized by the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec

 

 

SINTA WERNER | View more works by Sinta Werner>

Playing essentially with the architectural qualities of her surroundings, Sinta Werner’s architectonic installations deconstruct and fragment the space - creating not merely optical illusions but even elaborate fictitious environments through which the viewer’s perception is misled by wrongfooted expectation and disorientation – therefore dissolving conventional ways of seeing and representing. These different scenarios are achieved by various techniques such as collage, pictorial arrangements in space and scenographic installations involving geometrical structures as well as architectural elements.
Werner produces her stage sets for her games of illusion in an almost painterly manner, devising similarities without wanting to simulate perfection. Her practice deals with the concept of “optimal point of view“ and more commonly of one-point-perspective from which the space appears flat and pictorial. This interest in the interval state between picture and space is influenced by principles taken from the theatrical stage and Werner thus engages with the tradition of illusionistic painting.
With her variations on deception and loss of realities, Werner again and again evokes this kind of moment of (re)cognition in the viewer. She turns viewers into protagonists who enter her stage-like rooms and fall prey to the illusions, but then become like detectives or explorers, exposing the tricks and decoding the constructions and illusions – as the observers of their own perception of their own selves


Sinta Werner graduated from Goldsmith's College in 2007. Recent exhibitions include Grey Areas (solo), NETTIE HORN, London; The Third Floor (solo), COMA (Center for Opinions in Music and Art), Berlin ; Der subversive Raum (solo) , Galerie Kunstverein, Baden, Austria ; Tiefer Raum und Fremde Welt, Kunstverein Aichach, Aichach, Germany ; Form Versus Inhalt, Haus am Kleistpark, Berlin.