Anna Barriball and Dirk Braeckman

venue: Maschinenhaus M1
Anna Barriball and Dirk Braeckman
March 22–July 5, 2020

The double exhibition Anna Barriball and Dirk Braeckman brings together new and recent work by two artists whose practice is deeply embedded in process and working with the surface and tactile qualities of paper. Both challenge the boundaries of their chosen media and share questions of time. However, they stand in opposition in their treatment of subject: whereas Braeckman captures the fleeting moment in which his images were taken, Barriball considers time a medium with which to create her drawings, revealing something unseen.

In her work Anna Barriball (*1972 in Plymouth, lives in London) combines various media such as video, drawings, and photography characterised by its often particular, strong luminous colour. Her interest lies particularly in the relationship of the mundane object to the flat surface of the paper. To reveal the peculiarities of the texture, Barriball processes paper with wax, graphite pencil or pigments before revealing the object’s imprint. In doing so she creates drawings such as the series Windows (2018-2020), where the processed paper’s new surface carries the structure of the glass. Her newest work Blinds (yellow and pink) (2020) is presented for the first time at the KINDL, a diptych of horizontally folded wax drawings that simulate window blinds and the changing light falling through the slats. The exhibition features the large-format three-channel video Fade (2017) which reflects Barriball’s enduring interest in temporality across mediums.

Dirk Braeckman’s (*1958 in Eeklo, lives in Ghent) black and white photographs have an enigmatic impact and unfold a strong physical presence in the space. At the KINDL Braeckman combines photographs from the past two decades with his most recent works. His mainly large format photographs, mounted on aluminium, depict the overlooked, mundane with an ever-present distance. Never tethered to time and place, Braeckman photographs non-places. Through labour-intensive chemical processing and experimental compositional modification in the darkroom, the images become eternal observations and timeless moments. Braeckman never immediately uses the negatives but places them in his archive. He dates his work based on the printing date – months or years after the images were taken. Only at that moment does he consider the work to be finalised.