David Claerbout. The Shape of Time

Raymond Bellour, Françoise Parfait, Dirk Snauwaert & Christine Van Assche.

The works of Belgian artist David Claerbout (*1969) are marked by an interrogation of time as an artistic medium. Inspired both by phenomenology and by Gilles Deleuze's writings on the image and cinema (“The Time-Image and “The Movement-Image, 1983), he has developed a kind of “photography in movement, a still movement," into which he introduces narrative elements.
Navigating between the still and the moving image, between photographic and digital techniques, Claerbout produces works that are not easy to “consume": looking at his work means spending enough time waiting for things to happen, an experience of duration which provides the viewer both the conditions and the desire to re-think what narration and story-telling can be in face of the image and its current technologies.