Valerie Belin / The Illusions of Life

Valerie Belin. The Illusions of Life

“My work may be described as a desperate attempt to appropriate reality in which the ‘body’, in the broadest sense of the word, plays a decisive role. When there is no body in my photograph, there will inevitably be some kind of figure whose form highlights the idea of dematerialisation or absence. On the other hand, when the body is represented explicitly, it is represented as décor or as a singularly absent object. That fundamental ambivalence of the being in my photographs leads me to the conclusion that I always represent one thing with another, that the subject I am dealing with is never represented in the image, and that it is my own body that wishes to see itself as close as possible to the beings and things I photograph. As if photography were the medium for turning a state of being into an object, for providing an answer to one riddle through another riddle, for facing up to what cannot be named by speaking of something else”.

Valerie Belin