Catalogue > At random

In a remote industrial site in Inner Mongolia, miners extract a strategic resource essential to our way of life under dramatic human and environmental conditions. This is where 80% of rare earth minerals, essential to the manufacture of digital technologies, come from. A miner working on the site shares his thoughts on his life and working conditions. White Cloud is a film developed with generative AI that offers a unique perspective on the Bayan Obo mining district. While questions of geopolitics, ecology, capitalism, conspiracy and future scenarios run through the film, the essence is the testimony of a lone miner in search of a better future.

Emmanuel Van der Auwera (b. 1982, BE) works multidisciplinary with video, theater, sculpture, printmaking and often in tension between art and technology, reality vs. simulation and the trivialization of violence. Finding his material in the rampant image production of a global screen culture, he is interested in the meaning of images and how they depict reality while at the same time constructing it. Van der Auwera is the winner of the Goldwasserschenking awarded by WIELS and the Belgian Royal Museums of Fine Arts. His work has been featured in exhibitions at the Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich; WIELS, Brussels; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Palais de Tokyo, Paris; Centro per l’Arte Contemporanea Luigi Pecci, Prato and the HeK - House of Electronic Arts, Basel; amongst others. In 2023, Van der Auwera's work was presented in exhibitions at the Biennale internationale des arts numériques de la Région île-de-France (Paris, FR), Z33, House for Contemporary Art, Design & Architecture (Hasselt, BE). In 2024, his work was shown in the Biennale de l’Image en Mouvement 2024 - BIM 24 (Geneva, CH), KW Institute for Contemporary Art (Berlin, DE), 8th Yokohama Triennale (Yokohama, JP), Kunsthal Charlottenborg (Copenhagen, DK), Kunstverein Hamburg (Hamburg, DE), Deichtorhallen Hamburg (Hamburg, DE), and Royal Academy of Fine Arts (Antwerp, BE).