15.01.26 – 18.01.26, Tom Callemin, Double Reality (research output)

Tom Callemin's artistic research starts from the question of how identity and meaning arise within our perception of images. These processes are constantly changing now that digital and artificial techniques effortlessly generate convincing realities. The photographic images we are confronted with every day increasingly show us a fictional illusion. A fundamental tension is particularly evident in portraiture: behind the skin of the synthetic body lie not psychology or emotions, but merely mathematical calculations of data.

Based on this theme, Callemin set to work with analogue materials such as plaster, wood, clay, shadow and light to create new images that challenge our perception. Like a mirror, each image is a reflection of our gaze and of the act of depicting itself. What do we see? Can we believe the image as it presents itself to us? To what extent do we ourselves give meaning to what we see, apart from what is happening before our eyes?

In the exhibition, Callemin's photographic work is combined with an extensive archive of visual material that addresses these issues throughout history and in different contexts. The developments we are confronted with today in the field of visual culture are not new. With the advent of each medium, such as painting, film and sculpture, which once constituted a technological innovation, similar questions arose about image, meaning and illusion.

A third section of the exhibition stems from the collaboration with filmmaker Griet Teck, who translated the visual research in Callemin's studio into a short film. We get a glimpse of how details from the studio form an illusion in front of the camera. Entire landscapes are constructed in the privacy of the studio as a second reality, where reality unfolds slightly differently. This reveals the underlying constructions of the images that Callemin meticulously builds up. It becomes clear that his images carry an illusion not only in their subject matter, but also in their creation.

Tom Callemin is an artistic researcher affiliated with KASK & Conservatorium, the school of arts of HOGENT and Howest. The research project “Hidden in Plain Sight” was funded by the HOGENT Arts Research Fund.