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The series MUSA consists of twenty-six works of UV printed photographs on brass. The works are divided into three sizes which measure 150 x 200, 37,5 x 50 and 80 x 100 cm. The photographs for these works have been taken at various greenhouses in Morocco, which harvest Banana Trees. On the images we see abstract impressions of green and yellow leaves pressed against the plastic sheeting of the greenhouses. On top of that we see strips of copper wiring that keep the plastic sheets in position. It is the first series of images in Vanoverberghe’s work that solely puts the focus on the natural aspect of our surroundings. The work is a continuation in Vanoverberghe’s research to the material in which he presents his photographs. The visual atmosphere of the works constantly change due to the light that is captured or reflected by the brass material. Vanoverberghe engages with photography, employing diverse printing techniques, installations, structures, and discovered objects in his artistic practice. His creations capture landscapes and their remnants in a perpetual state of transformation, revealing the intricate interplay between place and time. Through his works, Vanoverberghe explores the convergence of history, nature, and heritage, presenting viewers with a visual dialogue that spans both the historical ruins and commonplace locales.

Ongoing project - UV cured prints on either brushed, polished or anodised aluminium.

In this new exhibition, Sybren Vanoverberghe reveals a new series of photographs that were taken in the evocative Moroccan desert. The series of images show us a parade of artefacts and hideouts, isolated and serenely present within the vast landscape. But also depictions of ancient engravings and other faded traces from bygone times like a dead dromedary, floating in a state between fossil and cadaver, drowned under the smouldering heat of a blazing sun. Ruins embrace the desert vegetation and improvised human structures turn into shelters in this merciless landscape. The series submerges itself in the ‘nothingness’ the desert has to offer its visitors. This nothingness inspired Vanoverberghe to go on an extensive quest for traces from a recent or nearly forgotten past. For quite some time now this archaeological approach has been the main theme of his artistic odyssey. The traces manifesting in Desert Spirals take on different guises but they are, above all, oozing with human spirit. The human presence manifests itself in the hastily erected constructions nestling in the landscape. The materials used are often left behind. Sometimes they’re swallowed up by the landscape, other times they’ve been reused in a new shape. Building materials like a weathered lamppost that served its purpose, a carpet resting to dry or a newly chiselled bloc of marble that was recently freed from a rock become the décor in the vast and barren sand plain. The series focuses on the idea of humble societies, nomadic living and the art of building with few materials. The ancient engravings merge with contemporary images of the desert landscape, creating a play with past and present, time and place. This unique imagery and often overexposed pictures create a continual motion from image to image. Every image functions as a portal to the next, with association and design leading the way. For this new exhibition, Vanoverberghe has joined hands with architect and scenographer Theo De Meyer. Together they have converted the gallery space into a maze of rooms through which the visitor is guided by means of custom made doors, portals and obstacles. Simple building materials were stacked up and positioned to add an additional layer of tension to the presented images. It feels as though one is suddenly dropped into an anachronistic décor in which everyone suddenly put down their tools in the middle of the construction process and vanished. The exhibition explores the delicate balance between architecture, and its remnants, and the relicts man left behind in a desert landscape. Vanoverberghe investigates how he can capture these traces through photography in an associative way. Desert Spirals thus turns into a stroll between stirring images functioning like precious notes from a landscape of nothingness. Text by Koen Leemans

Sandcastles and Rubbish is the title of this new publication, which is in fact an artist’s book. The publication isn’t a catalogue, but a well-planned, printed exhibition in the shape of a book. The book as mobile space: a book that eludes supporting walls and offers a potential public the chance to introduce art into the home without having to move to some other place. This book should be considered a distant relative of the ephemeral exhibitions Seth Siegelaub made at the end of the 1960s. The legendary New York art dealer found a way out of the then prevailing dematerialization process of art, which during the revolutionary 1960s ensued from the general, harsh and fundamental criticism of the work of art as a commodity on the free market. The title Sandcastles and Rubbish is a direct reference to the place where these images were created/came to a standstill: on derelict industrial sites where the archaeological remains continue to disintegrate due to indifference, decay and strategic considerations of estate agents. Paradoxically, in this decline of industrial buildings, there’s beauty and poetry—which has nothing to do with nostalgia or lending an ear to jubilant cries about a distant socioeconomic past. These remains of industrial archaeology are transformed by Vanoverberghe into an aestheticizing visual language, which set in black and white is not the subject of nostalgia, but refers to a concrete reality. Time and again, the reality of time produces innovation, generates industrial and human outsourcing, and here and there it presents in a cultural-tourist setting traces of ‘conserved decay’ that have been turned into ‘museum items’. Vanoverberghe contributes to a specific approach of the concept ‘archive’. He shows ‘what’ remains intact and visualizes it as a fluid collection of ‘that’ which before long won’t be there any longer. Dust, sand and other matter cover the industrial production that has ground to a halt. Dust is the patina of time under which the standstill transforms into a ‘sublime’ deviant of a monument. The Dutch artist Jan Dibbets acquainted me with the photography of Albert Renger-Patzsch (1897-1966), who with his extreme close-ups of for example industrial landscapes is considered a pioneer of the Neue Sachlichkeit. From a historical perspective, Vanoverberghe is indebted to Renger-Patzsch, which finally brings us to a joint work by Man Ray and Marcel Duchamp, Élevage de poussière (1920). Man Ray photographed Duchamp’s Large Glass after it was covered with dust. Made using a long exposure time, the photograph conveys the effect of an aerial view of a desertscape. The photograph was published in a Dada journal in 1922, with a remarkable caption by Duchamp: View taken from an aeroplane by Man Ray. Outtake from a text written by Luk Lambrecht

Sybren Vanoverberghe recognizes the paucity of our efforts to harness time and empire through physical record. He assumes the position of an observer meandering through the ruins of the contemporary world looking at walls, mosaics, architecture and stone. He files away their surfaces, makes notes of the mortar between clay oven-fired bricks and ascribes a new value to their documentation suggesting a deep understanding of the violence of empire, of culture and of ruin. His instance to govern these models of ages allows him the freedom to stand oblique to their edifice and to act as a scribe translating historical defect into future concern. He walks and works between worlds penning notes of a time indecipherable from the past and future alike and in his doubt of what is observed, he finds greater truth in regarding the present moment, the only autonomous point of reference. His work will live on as it must, conscribing itself to the same actualization as the ruins that lumber before him; that of a displaced decay. In 1099, Sybren Vanoverberghe proposes that we consider time, material essence, but also the paucity of memory as it relates to our efforts to combat futility through architecture and lasting elements. His effortless ability to illustrate our condition lies within his ability to understand and to disseminate the one casual truth of our collective efforts-that they are immaterial and that our ability to describe them in language temporal. Vanoverberghe concentrates his efforts on the material remnants of history. Brick is word and leaves itself stacked and exposed to toppling down, creating the clausterphobia of rubble. His insight into the exotic and somehow still familiar forms ask the viewer to consider what effort, shelter and imperial architecture mean in a world in which nothing is but sand. How shall we speak about the past if it is not allowed to govern our present and obliquely challenge our future? The circulation of images of these architectural deformities that Vanoverberghe calls attention to are the challenged trophies of civilizations lost and whose mere existence bravely rests in our ability to discuss them and yet like any lost civilization buried deep beneath the sands of time or the rising waters of a lost archipelago, Vanoverberghe acknowledges that memory, history and culture are there to be ruined and his work enables the conceptual framework for which we are to view and challenge their edifice. The scaffolding as it were of this confrontational with historical materiality is ironically (not cynically the foundation, the very bedrock for understanding the violence of time against human concepts of progress. In calling these bold elements into question, Vanoverberghe releases us from the manacles of a destiny and gives license, true license for us to understand the complexity and violent world in which we exist and for which we wish to communicate in futility. Text by Brad Feuerhelm

Historical modes of investigation, like photographic representation, falter at the lines construed between memory, meaning and representation. What we principal by the temerity of history, suggests that we also give to the photograph or document as a status construed as real. Sybren Vanoverberghe makes a request that we acknowledge the act of historical representation as inherently unstable. Without agreeing to disagree about representations of history and photography, Vanoverberghe realizes that our ultimate ability to draw meaning from a place, its people and their political power structures will fail. Vanoverberghe’s Conference of the Birds is a body of work in which the artist has forensically interpreted a site in Iran by looking for observable characteristics which could potentially declare, in photographic terms, clues to the decimation of its being. The site, previously burnt to the ground has been left to a ruinous existence. This village that Vanoverberghe has documented challenges our need for answers with a solution to look at it through metaphor, sculptural analysis and non-agreeable positions of historical interpretation. This is in part what Eyal Weitzman refers to as the threshold of detectability-unseen marks, scars and trauma become examined in their minutiae to create a relative document and understanding of place. In Vanoverberghe’s case, he is not looking for finite meaning through the act of observing this site, but rather wishes to illustrate a condition of place and its multiple possibilities for historical representations. Without acknowledging a more fluid set of values and meanings, Vanoverberghe would be creating documents in spite of themselves by offering few historical alternatives. In Vanoverberghe’s work, we have the crux of photographic representation in its relative and observable discourse, which is the only discourse suitable for images in which one bears witness, but is which also encourages elasticity to their historical interpretation. Historical modes of investigation, like photographic representation, falter at the lines construed between memory, meaning and representation. What we principal by the temerity of history, suggests that we also give to the photograph or document as a status construed as real. Sybren Vanoverberghe makes a request that we acknowledge the act of historical representation as inherently unstable. Without agreeing to disagree about representations of history and photography, Vanoverberghe realizes that our ultimate ability to draw meaning from a place, its people and their political power structures will fail. Vanoverberghe’s Conference of the Birds is a body of work in which the artist has forensically interpreted a site in Iran by looking for observable characteristics which could potentially declare, in photographic terms, clues to the decimation of its being. The site, previously burnt to the ground has been left to a ruinous existence. This village that Vanoverberghe has documented challenges our need for answers with a solution to look at it through metaphor, sculptural analysis and non-agreeable positions of historical interpretation. This is in part what Eyal Weitzman refers to as the threshold of detectability-unseen marks, scars and trauma become examined in their minutiae to create a relative document and understanding of place. In Vanoverberghe’s case, he is not looking for finite meaning through the act of observing this site, but rather wishes to illustrate a condition of place and its multiple possibilities for historical representations. Without acknowledging a more fluid set of values and meanings, Vanoverberghe would be creating documents in spite of themselves by offering few historical alternatives. In Vanoverberghe’s work, we have the crux of photographic representation in its relative and observable discourse, which is the only discourse suitable for images in which one bears witness, but is which also encourages elasticity to their historical interpretation. Text by Brad Feuerhelm

Combinations, subtleties and an underlying sense of direction almost push the viewer or reader through Sybren Vanoverberghe’s 2099; I choose the words viewer and reader here as so much of our history is read and repeated and so much of our present is viewed. To open this book for the first time, move through the pages, and follow the subtle lines which link the images together and guide you, is to pick up on Vanoverberghe’s questioning of our engagement with how events might evolve. There is a powerful concern with a constant evolution or shifting of events, and how we piece these events together as afterthoughts; indeed, the very nature of memory is changing the more we try to record it, but it is rare to find a photographer who can employ a genuine sense of awe to the narrative when producing such a piece of work. As well as making considered links which tie to one another throughout the book and work, there are images in Vanoverberghe’s work which force us to look outside and consider photographers such as Minor White, and these subtle visual links again give weight to the ideas which run through this work. The cover sets a mood with subtle tones running through it which are continued throughout in an almost melodic way, akin to a faded cine film. Once we are inside the book we are greeted by a layout which reminisces, in an appropriately deconstructive and referential manner, to the exhibited work; images are given negative space, they are displayed in a way suitable for each image, rather than a mistakenly uniform fit-to-page way. Vanoverberghe has been meticulous here to skilfully make translations from one medium to another and back again. The few deeply saturated prints punctuate, allowing us to take a breath and remind us that we are reading. In 2099, Vanoverberghe has managed to put together a work which belies many of the joys it has to offer with a first viewing; it is a work one must go back to, take apart and consider for a longer than the present. Text by Katie Stretton