MONOCULTURE | A Recent History

Sven Augustijnen makes videos and films where he takes a critical look at reality. A reality that we all experience as matter-of-fact but, in his work, comes over as complex and cloudy. In his early work, language and its use is a recurrent motif. He exposes the conventions and arbitrariness in our use of language. In his recent work he concentrates on portrait series. Sven Augustijnen unravels reality, with a focus on Brussels, home-base of the artist and setting for most of his films. He intentionally seeds confusion between formats like the docusoap, human-interest, pseudo-documentaries and home-movies. He plays with the conventions and frontiers of the documentary tradition on the one side, and the fictive possibilities of film on the other. The stories that Sven Augustijnen tells are entertaining. As a viewer we’re easily swept along. But the artist misleads us; we voyeuristically observe various events where fact and fiction are not easy to tell apart. As a viewer, we are taken to that strange ‘in-between’ that the artist creates for us.