David Claerbout - Five Hours, Fifty Days, Fifty Years

David Claerbout's exploration into the technological image amounts to a unique practice merging experimental cinema, video installation, digital animation and information based live streaming. Claerbout's essential interest is in the way we perceive images. His works rearrange the distinction between vision, memory and hallucination.

On October 18th a comprehensive exhibition of selected works by Claerbout, titled Five Hours, Fifty Days, Fifty Years, will open at Konschthal Esch. The exhibition will serve as an encapsulated overview and include both earlier and recent works from Claerbout's complex oeuvre, as well as his new work The woodcarver and the forest, described by the artist as less to be seen and more to live with. It is a performative film installation operating like a ruthless deforestation machine disguised as a mindful and pleasant meditative scene programmed to last for several years during which a forest surrounding the woodcarver’s modernist villa will be depleted as its trees will be used to make wooden objects.

On the occasion of the exhibition a special book about the different chapters, disciplines, techniques, and fields of knowledge comprising Claerbout’s practice will be published by König Books, providing us with an interpretative key and a sort of glossary to the artist’s work.

Biography

Since his graduation from the Nationaal Hoger Instituut voor Schone Kunsten in Antwerp, David Claerboout (born 1969 in Kortrijk, lives and works in Antwerp) has been developing a unique self-reflexive approach to the production, presentation, and perception of images. Claerbout’s interest in the merging of the human into the technological (and vice versa) is a thread underlying his practice, informing his images, films, installations and drawings.

Claerbout’s work was the subject of many monographic exhibitions in leading art institutions in Europe and America, e.g., Wiels in Brussels, Pinakothek der Moderne in Munich, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMoMA), Schaulager in Basel, among other things. The exhibition planned for Konschthal Esch will be the his first solo exhibition in Luxembourg.