White noise, blue canvas: Emmanuel Van der Auwera at Harlan Levey Projects

Drone strikes, quantum physics, and kaleidoscopic nightmares… In his first solo show at Harlan Levey Projects, Emmanuel Van der Auwera only has eyes for you.

"We have ended up in a world where we need quantum physics to figure out what is going on," says Emmanuel Van der Auwera, while he walks us through his first solo show at Harlan Levey Projects. "Everything Now Is Measured by After" – a phrase he borrowed from Don DeLillo's post-9/11 novel Falling Man – hints at that seemingly inextricable complexity in a surprisingly transparent form. In two adjacent rooms that mirror each other, Emmanuel Van der Auwera takes a closer look at what we see, the way we see it, and whether what we see is also what we get.

The first, white space presents three examples – in an alluring cyan blue – from his Memento series, newspaper offset plates that have been inscribed but not yet chemically secured. By isolating parts of the plates with cardboard before exposing them to white light, he captures certain images while burning away the rest of the information.

"The images are pictures of crowds after a catastrophe, like the failed coup in Turkey or the Orlando nightclub shooting. Such an event can create a chain reaction that produces a piece like this. It has a connection with what I did with A Certain Amount of Clarity, turning the camera on the witness." In that film, which won him the Langui Prize at the 2015 edition of the Young Belgian Art Prize, Van der Auwera shows a succession of response videos, clips people had made of their emotional reactions to a murder video.

"These images, like the ones in A Certain Amount of Clarity, only derive meaning from the event. So they are very close to it, but exist slightly afterwards, as a recomposition. They create a new reality, which, in turn, becomes the thing we see."

I see you
In the second, black room, three big screens emit a mesmerising white noise. "Videosculpture XII consists of three monolithic advertising monitors of which I tore apart the polarising filter. The visual information is still there, but you can't see it. By placing the filters in the space, mounted on tripods, I could turn them into a real body. The whole installation is a kind of stage or set, where the viewer engages actively in a choreography. When looking at the screens through the polarising filters you see subjective views of secret drone strikes. As if you yourself were targeting the people in these abstracted landscapes."

By making explicit the fact that it is often an affective response in the aftermath of things that shapes the global image that becomes reality, by deconstructing the process, the fabric, and the materiality through which we perceive, and by making it crystal clear that what we see is not always what it seems and that things unseen are sometimes genuinely there, Emmanuel Van der Auwera impresses upon us the responsibility of our own perspective.

"It is about making the viewer aware that he is looking. Looking is creating; it's not a passive thing. You need to decipher what you see. And that implies a certain responsibility. How do we create this image of the world? What kind of filter do we use? What is there and what is missing?"

Shiver
The zeitgeist also plays on the tensile space between event, filter, and viewer. "The screen has become a kind of portal to another land. With your smartphone you're literally crawling through a wormhole. You can only wonder which has more weight: the real thing or this? And even that dichotomy is old hat nowadays. The world has been sucked in, leaving everything in reverse. It is not important that you know the truth, or even that the truth is out there."

"What is important is that you share stuff so that you activate the self-fulfilling prophecy of the design, which, however invisible it is, serves an ideology: the more connections the better. It's all about aesthetics and filters. It's the language of art, really. The viewer has become completely implemented in the chain of producing cultural content, curated by the company. It's a kaleidoscopic nightmare."

"I've always been interested in the aesthetics of the sublime. We want things to be controlled, harmonious, but these things rage, they install an absurd design inside normality. The dematerialised world is becoming a real representation, not even a metaphor but real fact. So it is a sublime thing, in that it is beyond the possibility of representing. It's only through cracks, fragments, remnants, and shivers that you can access it. White noise, blue canvas…those are the same thing in a way. It's not abstract, it's just not meant to be seen."

> Everything Now is Measured by After. > 4/3, Harlan Levey Projects, Elsene/Ixelles