SCREENS | THOMAS KUIJPERS

Through the analysis of a vast and multifaceted visual archive, Kuijpers observed how in the narration of some contemporary events the psychic phenomenon of anxiety, social anxiety in particular, finds online the possibility of growing deliriously up to moment in which it breaks into offline reality, influencing the ways of representing and communicating the concept of truth. Once spread in physical reality, this feeling of apprehension spills back virtually into a self-sustaining circle of often unfounded anguish that rewrites the perception of events, and their transmission.

Kuijpers transforms these images into real barriers that place a conceptual and physical limit on the tendency to base our communication only on partial information, repeated images, slogans, clichés and icons trying to put order in the chaotic and uncontrolled flow of data that nestles in our mind. Screensis exactly that, an amateur video still shot during the riots in Charlottesville, USA, in 2017 with a group of protesters trying to break through a police cordon to protect a statue. Kuijpers selects a layered structured image, cuts out a specific detail of the scene in which this layering is evident and uses the imposing format of the print to give us back the sense of urgency and excitement that can only be removed from a conscious analysis of the medium and the content of this information.

Thomas Kuijpers, Screens, 2019
Black and white print on matt paper from archival footage, ambiental dimension.
©Thomas Kuijpers, courtesy METRONOM
 
21/10/2020