The new Antwerp gallery IN-DEPENDANCE officially opens with the solo exhibition of Belgian artist Anton Kusters
IN-DEPENDANCE, the new Antwerp gallery by the founders of IBASHO, is presenting Waiting for our Sight, a solo exhibition of Belgian artist Anton Kusters, as the official opening exhibition.
Anton Kusters (°1974, Hasselt. Lives and works in Belgium and Japan) is obsessed by the human condition and transmission between generations. In the show, Kusters presents a series of works across various media that poetically explore themes of time, humanity, generational trauma, destruction and the moral complexities of war.
Over the past 6 years, he has examined the impact of collective commemoration on the future memory of traumatic events such as the Holocaust, firebombing of Japanese cities with napalm in 1945 and the atomic bomb explosion over Hiroshima. The concept of time and speculation is central to his work, influencing both his artistic process and the work itself. By using time as a conceptual tool, Kusters reflects on how it heals wounds, remains frozen or borrowed and alters processes and imagery over time.
The Belgian photographer had only recently learned that his grandfather had narrowly escaped deportation by the German occupying forces during the Second World War. Consequently, questions such as where he might have been taken, and what would have happened to him, haunted Kusters and ultimately led him to Auschwitz. He was so overwhelmed by this place where more than a million people had been murdered, that it took him over an hour before he could enter the camp. Although Kusters had his camera with him the whole time, at the end of the day he had taken just one photo – of the clear blue sky. It was the only image that felt right for him, and was to become the central motif of a comprehensive study: The Blue Skies Project.
Next to that series, Kusters is also presenting 4 other series at IN-DEPENDANCE: Zero (2021), Inter, Remnants (2024), Blue Lines (2024) and Eucalypt Story (2024).
Anton Kusters
Waiting for our Sight
07 September - 17 November 2024
IN-DEPENDANCE
Waalsekaai 59, 2000 Antwerp
Vernissage and official opening Saturday 07 September from 2-6 pm
The projects
- The Blue Skies Project (2018)
The Blue Skies Project consists of several connected works over different media and platforms, speaking of intergenerational trauma and memorialisation today. Over six years, Kusters researched and traveled to all 1.078 former Nazi Germany concentration camps and killing centers across Europe, to photograph a blue sky above each last known location. The Polaroid medium was specifically chosen here for its fragility and sensitivity, irreversibly fading over time like our collective memory. Each image is also stamped with the estimated number of victims and GPS coordinates of that location. Struck by seeing more than half of these sites having no visual remains today, Kusters' upward viewpoint asks us how we see, and how we choose to remember.
The other series exhibited at the gallery responds to the catastrophic firebombing of Japanese cities with napalm in 1945, which destroyed 67 cities, culminating in the use of two atomic weapons on 6 and 9 August 1945. While the use of atomic bombs irrevocably altered the course of humanity, the napalm firebombing campaign, the most devastating in human history, has largely faded from collective memory.
- Zero (2021-)
Referencing Thomas Ruff's Sterne (Stars) and Tacita Dean's chalk blackboard drawings, the ongoing Zero series is a visual investigation of random dust, scratches, creases and fingerprints that contemplates the act of looking at things lost, impossible to recuperate. This speculative work questions how we see and how we attach meaning through time. These are enlarged prints of the original back of the peel-apart polaroids used in The Blue Skies Project. Their initial content has now become a tabula rasa: an erased, unseeable, latent presence, waiting for our sight.
- Eucalypt Story (2024)
The central video piece Eucalypt Story represents an apocalyptic moment stretched in time. The video superimposes the timeline and dialogue text from the 1953 film Tokyo Story by Yasujiro Ozu on top of slow-motion footage of a surviving eucalypt tree in Hiroshima, Japan. As the tree moves in the wind, we witness a flash of light stretched out over 2 hours and 16 minutes as everyday conversations ebb and flow, generations connect and time passes. During extreme close-ups, the camera searches for latent meaning in what the sensor has captured. The tension between text and image attempts to open up a space for reflection.
- Inter, Remnants (2024)
The Eucalyptus tree recurs in the series Inter, Remnants, which examines the limits of contemporary technology. The eerie and ephemeral images of the tree in Hiroshima, captured with a lidar 360° scanner, evoke the fire of the napalm bombing and the lingering ghosts of the past, frozen in time. The impressionistic dots, blotches and colours in these images strive to depict what cannot be fully captured, while simultaneously imbuing the past with meaning.
- Blue Lines (2024)
Blue Lines is a series of paintings where the artist reflects on the notion of 'borrowed time’, an uncertain and limited period of time extending beyond or postponing the occurrence of something inevitable. The series takes us to the precise moment of the atomic bomb explosion over Hiroshima — an apocalyptic event that left an indelible mark on the world and etched deadly radiation burns onto the victims' skin in patterns mirroring their kimonos. The paintings feature representations of these indigo cloth patterns, as if viewed from beneath the skin through the obscuring fabric, into an abstract, barely discernible landscape. These works are fragmented narratives of that exact moment, repeatedly painted from different perspectives, contemplating the inevitability of time and its passage across generations.
About the artist
Anton Kusters, born in Hasselt in 1974, is fascinated by the human condition and transmission between generations. Remnants of fragmented narratives, the act of post-witnessing and the loss of experience of place are at the core of his practice.
Ranging from single autonomous pieces to large-scale projects, Kusters works across different media and creates installations that present themselves as alternate, fragmented narratives through complex themes such as time, solace, hope and doubt. He draws upon events, biographies and objects within his own family, connecting them to larger political and social histories, digital data and underlying patterns.
His work has been exhibited at Victoria & Albert Museum, Les Rencontres d’Arles, Deutsche Börse Photograph Foundation, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, The Photographers’ Gallery, among others.
Images
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