Five photographers from the Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp present their Bachelor projects in this exhibition. Theirs is a Slow Photography, a personal and suggestive approach rather than a descriptive, documentary mode.
Most of the young imagemakers in this show depart from their own life. Unlike the outsider-point of view observing from a cool distance, they don’t play it safe. Knowing their subject from the inside, they have something to tell you, from their lived experience of love and loss, of time passing and the silence of the night, or the encounter with the other in the city.  Even when the photographs look quite deadpan – as in the projections of Esmeralda Janson - trauma is at stake.
From personal experience the socio-cultural and political context is explored, as in the sensitive portraits of boys growing up in the alienating housing complex of the Cité Modèle in Brussels (Diane Mondésir), or in the short movie on the coming of age of young women raised in religious families and how they deal with their sexuality (Sarah van Wingerden). Hidden effects of the political system in Cuba on people and society are questioned in an elusive sequens of opaque and delicate pictures of a shared time and place (Veronika Breuer). We recognize a sign of the times disquiet in the series of dark cityscapes of a solitary, insomniac photographer (Bas Verrept). When grief is addressed in an ironic and indirect way, both Chat GTP AI’s generated tales of mourning, and the attempt to make sense of the photo-archive of the missed person fail grandiosely, leaving us with the clichés of our society’s inadequate relation to death (Esmeralda Janson).
What unites most of these projects is a remarkably soft gaze. The camera is used as a sensitive instrument to make contact and connect with the living world. Bodies and things, faces and places are wrapped in gentle attention. Atmospheric colour and light intimately touch upon surfaces and reveal what goes beyond appearances, looking deeper to levels of experience beneath.
This empathic camera catches indecisive and indefinite moments while they unfold.
Capturing a cloud is equally impossible as imagining grief but we try, and fail again.
          - Inge Henneman
You think you can tell is a group exhibition in which Bas's bachelor project Disquiet is presented.
Vernissage: Saturday 27th of May - 4pm
Open: Thursday till Sunday - 2pm till 6pm
Finissage: Sunday 4th of June - 4 pm
Participants: Bas Verrept, Diane Mondésir, Esmeralda Janson, Veronika Breuer, Sarah van Wingerden
Graphic design: Fadi Houmani
Go to the Facebook-event or poster
Disquiet

I wander in a pitch-black sleeping city
In search of clues, hidden in that alluring darkness
There is something there
Evidence of a case that remains unsolved
An unexplainable encounter with reality
I don’t know how I got here, but I know I will come here again
Wandering in this mental space
Allowing peace to return