Events/Openings

In her work, Lara Dhondt documents found, forgotten objects, materials and locations from among the urban landscape in an effort to imbue these marginalised things and places with a human dimension and a sense of dignity. She works as fast as possible, recasting found waste materials right on the spot (car body elements, packing crates, plywood...), and assembles them to form ephemeral sculptures. Dhondt’s work serves as a kind of monument to temporariness. The constructions are based on the dimensions of personal space. The resulting spatial demarcations and basic sculptures become altered into nomadic symbols, so to speak, and function as poetic podia for resistance. Dhondt resists the current financial and, above all, moral crisis with a call for humaneness and a search for meaning.

For her recent series Memento, she has selected a smaller scale than she has in the past, literally gathering (like a child) instead of constructing. The bouquets she leaves behind pay emotional tribute to the stories attached to the places in which they are left. Having experimented with this method twice before, the first related series, realized in Portugal, was presented at the Photography Museum of Amsterdam in May 2013; the second one was shot in Paris last summer and shown in Bourouina’s booth at Paris Photo. We are now delighted to be presenting it in Berlin.

Memento/Paris features black-and-white images, printed on Corten steel, displayed like ‘tiles’ in the gallery space (floor and walls), and one map. Most often marking the public spaces where she has left her sculptures via Google Maps, the locations of Dhondt’s creations and photographs can be traced through their GPS coordinates. During her photo session in Paris, she used a common paper map of the city to find her way back to places connected to her personal memory. This map, later transformed into several collages, writings and drawings, has itself become a part of the series. The consistent and methodical way in which Lara Dhondt works, along with a creative process that takes place exclusively outdoors and her documentation of that process, is firmly rooted in movements such as Land Art and the conceptual art of the 1960s and 70s.

Lara Dhondt (Turnhout, 1979) lives in Antwerp. In addition to photography, she uses various other media in her work, including installation, video, typography and performance.