COLLECTION

ET[-

Peter Downsbrough
ET[- opens with a silent black-and-white close-up of a vertical rod shuttling back and forth across a mechanical loom. The short sequence could be mistaken for footage from an early 20th-century propaganda film. Cut sharply to the next scene, also in black and white and taken from a fixed position but unmistakably contemporary...

I WATCHED THE WHITE DOGS OF THE DAWN

Els Dietvorst
Sound. A polyphony of wind, breaking waves, shrieking gulls, and rattling ships. The sea: a place of memories for those who survive her, a mother who confronts us with the powers of nature. Circulating and all-encompassing. Beneath her horizon there is only darkness and mystery. The separation of air and water creates a different world. A place where other rules and other laws apply...

Viol, 2008, Angel Vergara Santiago © the artist

VIOL

Angel Vergara
Two folded hands are pushing on a womans face which itself is covered by long hair. This scene is as intimate as uncomfortable to watch or witness...

KINT, DE L'AUTRE CÔTÉ

Olga Baillif
In 1956, several weeks after the Russian attack, Baillif’s mother escaped from Hungary. Because she never discussed her life before this departure from Budapest, nor her relatives, Olga Baillif decided to go on a search in this documentary, for the story of her mother, the family which stayed behind and memories in the historical context...

DE KLOK SLAAT VIJF: TEXTIELARBEIDER

Jef Cornelis
Some 200 years ago, spinning and weaving used to be a domestic industry. Women and children spun, the men wove. With the invention of the flying shuttle in the eighteenth century, weaving became industrialized. Some time later, in England a semi-mechanic spinning machine was invented. In Belgium, the town of Ghent was the main centre of the textile industry...

CHALK TRACE

Esther Johnson
As a child in the 1950s, Ron Cockroft drew a chalk line from his school in Oldham to his home in Chadderton. CHALK TRACE commemorates and reanimates his graffiti journey through a now much-changed network of streets. The film was photographed in the original streets of Oldham as they stand today – over 60 years after Ron’s original graffiti...

UBUNDU

Jelena Jureša
Jelena Jureša’s Ubundu, a film poem filmed at Antwerp Zoo, portrays the okapi, an animal exhibited for the first time in Antwerp in 1919 (the nine-month-old animal was an instant sensation, but within a month it grew weaker and eventually died)...

Black box, 2009 Herman Asselberghs © the artist(s) & producer(s)

BLACK BOX

Herman Asselberghs
The event that, without a doubt, marked the beginning of the new century in popular consciousness and is a benchmark for the mass media is 9/11...

Gand Sud, 2007, Angel Vergara Santiago © the artist

GAND SUD

Angel Vergara
Vergara filmed this piece looking southward over Ghent. On the edge of the Book Tower’s terrace lies an open catalogue of Chambres d’Amis, an exhibition which took place in Ghent in 1986. With a brush in his hand, he traces the images with gestures that suggest he is painting...

DANAË

Koen Theys
Throughout the video, we see a collage of amateur footage of anonymous women 'twerking'. Koen Theys found the material in abundance on the internet. This contemporary phenomenon seems to indicate these women are only able to make contact with the outside world via their webcam. Theys connects this seclusion with the Greek myth of Danaë a recurring subject in the course of painting history...