8. 5. 2024 seminar of accidental wisdom: Geert Goiris @ Fotograf Gallery
seminar of accidental wisdom: Geert Goiris @ Fotograf Gallery
8.5.2024
Geert Goiris teaches practice-based research at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp. He taught as visiting lecturer at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam, LUCA Brussels, CEPV in Vevey (CH), ISDAT in Toulouse (F), FH Bielefeld (D), ENSP Arles (F) and MentorMentor in Gent (B)
In his enigmatic images, Geert Goiris (b. 1971) confronts us with perplexity and alienation. His photographs challenge our sense of reality, showing a strangely familiar world that seems convincingly real and yet unfathomably fantastic. In this sense, the photographic image is never merely a conduit through which we can visually connect with the world beyond, but a means of addressing the essential difference between "experiencing" and "seeing."
Inspired by the ambiguous notion of high fidelity (technology that makes itself invisible or inaudible, as it were, to get closer to the "original") he consistently uses large-format analog cameras and scientific films that are more sensitive than the human eye. Despite the abundant detail in his prints or projections, the feeling that something is missing often prevails. This information deficit appeals to the viewer to fabulate, to put their own imagination to work.
Geert Goiris deliberately disconnects his photographs from a specific era so that it seems we are looking at both the past and the future.
In his work of recent years, Geert Goiris puts the predictive potential of images first. Photographic images are often understood as documents, traces of a past. In his series Prophet, World Without Us and Flash Forward, the photographer attempts to reverse this and present images as omens, foreshadowing something yet to occur.
His images have been exhibited at art institutions such as Boijmans Van Beuningen Museum in Rotterdam (2007), Wiels Contemporary Art Center in Brussels (2010), Palais de Tokyo in Paris (2010), Hamburger Kunsthalle in Hamburg (2011), Le Nouveau Musée National de Monaco (NMNM) (2012), Museum M in Leuven (2013), the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago (US) and Centre Pompidou- Metz (2016).
His works are held in international institutional collections such as the Fonds national d’art contemporain (F), the Musée d’art moderne de la Ville de Paris, Centro de Arte Contemporáneo de Caja de Burgos (ES), Fotomuseum, Antwerp (B), the Seattle Art Museum (USA) and MUDAM (L).
Geert Goiris has published seven monographic books books with Roma publications Amsterdam: Czar Bomba, Lying Awake, Prolifération, Prophet, Peak Oil, 2020 and World without Us.
The artist is represented by Galerie Art: Concept in Paris (France).