Pieter Geenen

Pieter Geenen (°1979) is an audiovisual artist, photographer and filmmaker. Together with Sirah Foighel Brutmann, Eitan Efrat and Meggy Rustamova he is a co-founder of the artist-run collective Messidor, a platform for reflection, production and distribution.

His work revolves around places, communities and events situated between appearing and disappearing, forgetting and remembering, destruction and resurrection, the utopian and the dystopian. They are subject to imperialism, war, oppression and persecution, migration, economic changes, globalisation, powers of nature, etc. Through strategies of inversion, mirroring, repetition, deconstruction and restructuring he approaches landscapes, spaces and elements where and around which people gather, coexist or live in conflict. They connect people and places who don't seem to share a common ground at first sight and remain merely exotic to the western mind. However, working across communities and locations activates potential new readings of the past and the present, and opens our understanding of concepts like land, borders, colonisation, (im)mobility, belonging and identity.

His practice reflects his interest in the potentiality of the gaze by exploring the relations between duration and memory. With his observational and place-based practice he aims to bring the ever evolving world to a standstill, a pause, where doubt arises, by manoeuvring between the imagined and the real, the static and the moving, image and sound. In that process he employs different media and technologies which often fail to live up to their inherent promise. Instead he embraces these mistakes, imperfections, errors and flaws.

A selection of solo exhibitions: Argos, Brussels (BE); Annie Gentils Gallery, Antwerp (BE); Musée d’Ixelles (BE); V2Vingt, Brussels (BE) and beeldende kunst Strombeek/Mechelen (BE). Selected group exhibitions: International Film Festival Rotterdam (NL), Biennale de l’Image Possible (BIP), Liège (BE); M-Museum, Leuven (BE); La Capella, Barcelona (ES); FRAC Basse-Normandie, Caen (FR); Argos, Brussels (BE); Médiathèque FMAC, Geneva (CH); Be-Part, Waregem (BE) and CIAP, Hasselt (BE). Selected screenings: New York International Film Festival (US); Hong Kong International Film Festival (HK); VIDEOEX, Zürich (CH); Doclisboa (PT); Images Festival, Toronto (CA); EMAF, Osnabrück (DE); EXiS Festival, Seoul (KR); FID, Marseille (FR); Rencontres Internationales, Paris/Berlin/Madrid (FR/DE/ES); Centre Pompidou-Metz (FR) and Beursschouwburg, Brussels (BE).