Geert Goiris

In his enigmatic images, Geert Goiris confronts us with perplexity and alienation. The photographer often positions himself as an outsider, thereby rendering tangible the distance between the observer and the subject. His photographs test our sense of reality, presenting a strangely familiar world that seems convincingly real and yet unfathomably fantastic. In this sense, the photographic image is never a mere gateway through which we can visually connect with the world outside, but a means to address the essential difference between “experiencing” and “seeing”.

An enduring fascination with the ambiguous notion of high fidelity (advanced technology that makes itself, as it were, invisible or inaudible in order to come closer to the ‘original’) underlies his consistent use of analogue large format cameras and technical films that are more sensitive than the human eye. Despite the abundance of detail in his prints or projections, a feeling that something is missing often prevails. This information deficit encourages the viewers to put their own imagination to work. His photographs are deliberately disconnected from any specific era, we seem to be looking at both the past and the future.

In his work of the past few years, Geert Goiris has placed the predictive potential of images at the forefront. Photographic images are often understood as documents, traces of a past. In the series Prophet, World Without Us and Flash Forward, an attempt is made to turn this around and present photographs as omens. A premonition of something that has yet to occur.