HD video, color, 16:9, stereo sound, BE, 2013, 16″ / Multi-channel video installation, stereo sound, BE, 2013, 16″
Journal, in its installation version, shows five one-shots (one take in the single-screen version), which follow the same parcours in a closed off exhibition of photographs in Wiels, Brussels. The selection of photographs, taken from the archive of photojournalist André Brutmann, presents international official visitors to the Holocaust Memorial Museum “Yad Va-Shem” in Jerusalem, throughout a period of two decades. The visitors – politicians and other VIPs – are documented in front of a well-known image taken from the liberated Nazi Concentration Camp Buchenwald, Germany, in April 1945. This image, together with other Liberation Photographs taken by the Allied Forces at the end of 2nd World War, were the first to be published from the front, shaping the role of photography as a participant in the writing of the history that war. This Buchenwald photograph is installed in Yad Va-Shem behind a white barbwire fence, which in time rusts. The fence illustrates the relations between preservation and stagnation. By introducing yet another cameraman and a lens through which the photograph-within-a-photograph is viewed. Journal proposes to reflect upon the reading of historical images through the prism of ‘institutional memory’ and ‘institutional hospitality’.
Selected exhibitions and screenings:
Argos Brussels 2014 and 2019; EMAF Osnabrück 2018; Rencontres Internationales Paris 2014; Courtisane Ghent 2014; Kunsthalle Basel, 2013; International Film Festival Oberhausen (awarded) 2013; The Flaherty New York 2013, IDFA Amsterdam 2013.