From the 28th October to 10th December 2016, Art : Concept will be pleased to present Plot Twist, its third solo exhibition with Geert Goiris (Bornem, 1971). Giving an entirely new direction to his work, for the first time the artist proposes a confrontation between photographs and videos.

The term “plot twist” refers to a rebound, a new development occurring unexpectedly within a plot. In the mysterious narrative created by the Belgian photographer, it corresponds to the emergence of moving images that have started to shake a work previously dominated by still images. Beyond photography but not quite films, these three videos (between one and two minutes) fit with extreme coherence into the practice of Geert Goiris. As often, his subject is a micro phenomenon, part of the natural order taking place in our absence; a makeshift locomotive going from point A to point B, a stretch of water covered with ice and a mountainous landscape invaded by a wave of smoke. Even though the medium changes, the relationship with image and the information it conveys remains the same. Again, there are no specifications of time or place. All the elements necessary to our understanding are perceptible (the subject is realistic, perfectly recognizable) but elusive enough to leave room for interpretation. The uniqueness of the video intervenes at this point: incorporating the viewer even more into the process.

The exhibition as a whole seems to follow a voluntarily open narrative construction. Despite some clues that could lead to the construction of a scenario not devoid of eschatological echoes - a surgical mask, a packedup car undergoing an undeniable mutation, a mirror without reflection - the purpose is not the disappearance of what is human, on the contrary. In a speech in the negative (in the philosophical sense of the term), this apparent absence just ends up signifying with force, strangeness and even violence, our presence in the world.

By almost empirically picking out - in a relatively objective manner - fragments of what is happening without us, the artist reintegrates humans and assigns a different role to them; to fill the gaps, to participate in building a common history whose outcomes are infinite.

Geert Goiris was born in Bornem (Belgium) in 1971, Geert Goiris lives and works in Antwerp. His work is present in many institutions such as the Seattle Art Museum, the Kunsthalle in Hamburg, the Antwerp Museum of Photography and the Museum of Modern Art of the City of Paris. Recently, several exhibitions were devoted to him: Fight or Flight in Frac Haute Normandie, Unfathomable at Belfast Exposed and Flashbulb Memories, Ash Grey Prophecies at Foam Fotografiemuseum in Amsterdam.

Text by Julia Mossé