Eponymously titled with his award winning 2014 film, “A Certain Amount of Clarity” is the first monograph dedicated to the artistic practice of Emmanuel Van der Auwera, whose work describes our experience of digitized life operating at intersections of documentary, reconstruction and fiction. His practice is one that demonstrates the impact of emerging technologies on perception and civic dialogue, building platforms for marginalized actors and engaging with technicians and scientists to explore the balance of ethics and aesthetics in new media. Through filmmaking, video sculpture, theatre, printmaking, and other media, Van der Auwera sets up encounters with found images that provoke a questioning of our visual literacy: How do images of contemporary mass media operate on various publics, and to what end? With the formal rigor of a logician, Van der Auwera dissects how images are engineered, mastering specialized industry techniques and intervening on their protocol. In so doing, Van der Auwera brings us no closer to a monolithic truth, but constructs new paradigms for reading images and understanding our relationships with them.
The artist will be participating in the first Jinan Biennial at the Shandong Art Museum, China, and in the exhibition PHOGOTRAPHY TODAY: RESISTANT FACES at the Pinakothek der Moderne in Munich, Germany. He will also have a solo exhibition at the Haus der elektronischen Künste in Basel, Switzerland, in 2021.
Edited by : Harlan Levey & Amanda Saroff
With contributions from:
Hans De Wolf, art historian, professor and researcher in modern and contemporary art, philosophy and aesthetics. Caroline Dumalin, artistic director of AAIR, artist residency and studio provider in Antwerp. Justine Ludwig, Executive Director of Creative Time in New York. Ive Stevenheydens, curator and writer.
