| 07/12/2006 | Visual Arts | Belgium |
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Beat Streuli
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| Posted by Lambert Picavet | |
  Erna Hecey Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of photographs and videos by Beat Streuli featuring the city of Brussels and its inhabitants. For more than 15 years Swiss-born Streuli has trained his camera on the modern city dweller: chance passersby, faces in the crowd, details of hairstyle and clothing, a fragile or stern or gregarious look. His photographic and video works examine the denizens of various urban centers, from New York and Krakow to Tokyo and Tel Aviv, plucking visages and gestures from the flow of street life. Though he captures his subjects unawares, in the midst of their daily activities, it would be a mistake to consider Streuli's metropolitan portraits as simply natural, genuine, or purely spontaneous. On the contrary, his images have a certain recognizable look, and bear the mark of artistic selection. His work plays on a whole series of contradictions between the natural and the stylized, documentary and fiction, publicity and privacy, human dignity and mass alienation, glamorized poses and the cruelty of light. The series move between showing the singularity of the individual (and the uniqueness of different cities) and testifying to the endless repetition of the same in our globalized, late capitalist world. Though often connected with that nineteenth century café-frequenting aesthete le flâneur, the 'gentleman stroller of the streets' searching for the extraordinary in the everyday, the flash of the eternal in the ephemeral, Streuli's art is decidedly less romantic than any Baudelairean reverie. Its flatness and seriality recall the aesthetics of fashion photography, a kind of Juergen Tellerish take on city crowds, while at the same time evoking the specter of anonymous surveillance that increasingly pervades urban space. The remarkable regularity of Streuli's artistic practice, covering city after city, is further reminiscent of the famous architectural studies of Bernd and Hilla Becher. The show at Erna Hecey will feature four videos shot at the Porte de Flandre, in front of the Tram 18 stop, showing people waiting to board public transportation. Four large-scale photographs printed on see-through adhesive film cover the front windows of the gallery, and a selection of photographs are displayed in the back. The monumental window images change subtly according to the outside lighting, creating a dynamic interplay with the surrounding architecture. Streuli's portraits of Brussels' street life, showing people of various cultures and religions, are inescapably political. However, their political significance resides less in any specific message or program than in giving visibility to the street, creating a 'psychogeography' (to use an old Situationist term) of the Brussels landscape. __________________________ galerie erna hécey s.p.r.l rue des fabriques 1c 1000 brussels t. +32.2 502 00 24 f. +32.2 502 00 25 info@ernahecey.com |