Catalogue > Un extrait vidéo au hasard

Wim Catrysse

MSR

0 | 0 | couleur | 14:58 | Belgique, Koweït | 2014

With 'MSR' we are set amidst the vast emptiness of the Kuwaiti desert where, to a great extent, the landscape has been claimed by two imperious industries, that is, the oil companies and the military machine that protects their interests. As they both make great effort to keep their stealthy activities concealed, the landscape, as we perceived it, is somehow being held hostage in a state of suspense… Located next to the 'Main Supply Route' (the route designated within an area of operations upon which the bulk of traffic flows — hauling beans, bullets and fuel — in support of military operations), we are confronted with a sequence of documentary footage that puts the focus on the travails and tactics of 'survivors', i.e. a pack of stray dogs that dwells within the boundaries of a dystopian world. In order to outlive an enraged desert storm, they seek shelter behind scattered pieces of waste and continuously dig holes in the sand, determined to withstand their antagonistic environment.

Wim Catrysse (°1973 born in Leuven, lives and works in Antwerp) gained a Masters degree in Visual Arts at the Higher Institute St-Lukas, Brussels in 1997. From 1997 to 2000, he followed a post-program course at the Higher Institute for Fine Arts (HISK) in Anvers followed by a one-year course at The Glasgow School of Art. Ever since the late 1990s Catrysse has been surveying the confines of visual constructions in his video installations, taking an architectural structure or the topographical features of a site as his starting point. He translates this investigation into cinematographic works in which the exposing and balancing of elementary forces play an essential role. The result is an accumulation of images that jerk us out of our comfort zone, that convey a physical threat, images that have about them something unheimlich and often unseat the obviousness of our most common perceptions. Moreover, Catrysse`s particular artistic method combines two apparently irreconcilable extremes: impulsiveness, physical directness, intuition and experimentation (almost nothing is worked out in detail beforehand) on the one hand and on the other an acute artistic and technical reasoning that can sometime lead to complex cinematographic image constructions.