Sine Van Menxel

Sine Van Menxel practices a very concrete kind of photography. The physical, experimental work in the darkroom is crucial in her artistic practice. Materials such as glass, water, saliva or her own body are confronted with the chemical skin of the photograph. In Van Menxel’s work, analog photography shows itself as an anachronistic medium, implemented to find alternative ways to portray life. By going back to its old techniques, she expands what we can understand as photography today. What she wants to capture is not a factual anecdote. New work often starts from a sense of longing, either intangible or as mundane as bathing in the sea or sitting at a table under a tree.

In the artists’ publication ‘A table under a tree’, an imaginary table moment is photographically captured using photograms. The space we look at tilts continuously between abstract and figurative. Glass surfaces were mechanically cut in the shape of spoons and plates and were then placed blindly on the photographic paper for exposure. Through repetition a narrative unfolds. Spoons are used, plates are lifted, a table is cleared. At the heart of this work lies the question how to visualize something that is out of sight. It explores how the photographic medium can see for us, and make us see. Shifting colors and the repetitive occurrence of the spoons and plates shape a rhythm that guides the viewer through the book with an indistinct sense of perspective or connection to space and time. An experience we may first link to a digital space. Disturbances such as scratches on the glass surface become tactile vanishing points that remind the viewer of the material that composed the image.

Occasionally, Van Menxel still wanders around with a camera. The resulting photographs manifest first and foremost a sculptural sensitivity. Light and space are uprooted from a concrete context. Works emerge here as words in a chain of signifiers and references, a lexicon of personal and archetypal references.

Francesco Del Conte

Francesco Del Conte (Milan, 1988) is a researcher and visual artist based in Brussels mainly working with photography. In the first years of his practice, he focused, in particular, on the design and the history of a series of building technologies employed in architecture and the industrial and artisan fields. On the line between a very objective feel and an enigmatic atmosphere, these photographic works are displayed as gelatin silver prints and as slide projections in di-alogue with the exhibition spaces. In 2016 he was invited to Japan by the Centre for Contemporary Art CCA Kitakyushu to attend a seven-month research program which will be very significant to his career. Since then, Del Conte has shaped a new approach to photography to create new insights about the medium itself. By deconstructing it into its most basic components – electromagnetic energy and time – today, he attempts to unveil the intrinsic paradoxes of the light-sensitive tool: the dynamic interplay between magic and science, the tension between abstraction and reality, and the enduring conflict between objectivity and subjectivity. In his current projects, he considers the camera as a light recorder rather than a tool to explore the concepts of narrative, space, and composition. This change of paradigm led the artist to produce a new body of work intertwined with other fields such as mineralogy, astronomy, and color science. Del Conte’s works are part of private and public collections and have been exhibited internationally.

Tim Theo Deceuninck

The photographic apparatus emerged in a world of dark smoke and fine dust. Developing in close interaction with industrial growth, it was dependent on the use of scarce and harmful resources. Aware of the ecological impact of photography (whether analog or digital), Tim Theo Deceuninck (°1992, Aartrijke) became interested in working with non-toxic (photo)graphic techniques. He found an example in the scientific work of the Scottish scientist Mary Somerville, who researched the light-sensitive qualities of plants. Despite promising results, she was not given the opportunity to publish her work. Moreover, since the production of photographic images with plants is slow, unpredictable and labor-intensive, the technique rapidly fell into oblivion.

In his most recent work, Deceuninck radicalizes the photographic apparatus by returning to its most rudimentary form: the camera obscura. Using holes in the landscape, he creates land cameras, made and produced on and by the same grounds they are portraying. The land camera project is an attempt to include a more-than-human point of view in the creation of the image. Hovering between culture and nature, these images are more about looking from within than of looking at.

Both for developing and printing his photographs, Deceuninck uses homemade developers and inks extracted from local plants. His sun-prints are made with poppies, a pioneer plant growing in disturbed soil, roadsides and industrial areas. By detoxifying his practice, learning from our ancestors and searching for representations of the world we share with more-than-human elements, the artist puts the human dimension in a reciprocal relationship with nature. Deceuninck’s work was shown at Concertgebouw Brugge, Technische Sammlungen Dresden, Design Museum Ghent, Art Antwerp,… and is part of the upcoming .TIFF 2025 program at FOMU Antwerp. He published two books ‘Letter to Mary S.’ and ‘Becoming Terrestrial: Notes towards the Land Camera’.