Cloud NOW | 展览作品「大卫·克拉耶博：鸟笼」

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Birdcage

Birdcage is a furtherance of David Claerbout's preoccupation with perception, cognition, time and temporality. In Birdcage, an explosion shatters the tranquillity of a picturesque garden, conveying a sense of emergency in what could be a  serene setting. The silent blast is captured with a long, muted shot, putting the viewer in a conflicted position to visually appreciate this scene of destruction.

Not without a hint to René Magritte's Empire des lumieres(The Empire of Lights), Birdcage explores how our perception actively composes the world we inhabit. Continuing the interests of earlier works, in which Claerbout shifted the principal role from foreground to background, Birdcage shifts the attention from the center to the periphery, from a sun-drenched, festive explosion of nature, to a state of tension. In line with his ideas about anti-anthropocentrism, the glossy starling and singing thrush are given a central role, highlighting the change in aura they undergo, from an index of lghtness to an expressionist portrait of fear.

As the film ends, we witness the gradual exchange of the energetic qualities of violence and peace. With Birdcage, David Claerbout explores how memory completes our visual perception, exposing that the human subject is, in essence, time.

Courtesy the artist and Esther Schipper, Berlin/Paris/Seoul, ? the artist

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David Claerbout was born in 1969 in Kortrijk, Belgium. He studied at the National Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp and at the Rijksakademie of Visual Arts in Amsterdam. He lives and works in Antwerp and Berlin. 

In 2007, David Claerbout was awarded the Will-Grohmann-Preis of the Berlin Akademie der Künste, and in 2010, he received the Peill-Preis of the Günther-Peill-Stiftung. He participated in the DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Program from 2002 to 2003. 

Originally trained in painting and drawing, David Claerbout is known for his works using photography, video, digital technology and sound. His practice revolves around the concepts of temporality and duration, images suspended in a tension between stillness and movement, as well as the experience of dilated time and memory. David Claerbout says that he “sculpts in duration. The definition of duration is different from that of time: duration is not an independent state-like time, but an in-between state.” With his large-scale video-based installations, the artist makes the viewer a part of the work: whether by establishing a connection between the projected images on the screen and the audience, or by creating a spatial relationship between the screen itself and the exhibition space, or simply, by allowing a process by which “a single scene can develop into another by the presence of the spectator and a bit of time.”