Art Brussels 2025, April 24 - 27, 2025
Emmanuel Van der Auwera / Solo Presentation / Harlan Levey Projects / Booth 5C-41
In parallel to Emmanuel Van der Auwera’s exhibition with Omer Fast and Max Pinckers at Harlan Levey Projects during Art Brussels 2025, the gallery will present a solo booth of the artist's most recent work at the fair. Additionally, Van der Auwera’s work will be featured in the Belgian Art Prize booth (alongside gallery artist Haseeb Ahmed) and the curated video section, “The Screen” where his award winning work White Cloud will be shown on Saturday, April 26th at 12:30.
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Throughout the booth, the sentence “NOAH WAS REAL” emerges in shifting tones, above a child whose visibility changes depending on the viewer’s perspective. These reflective metal surfaces—offset printing plates—have been diverted from their original industrial purpose and reimagined by Emmanuel Van der Auwera as part of Memento, a series spanning nearly a decade (2016–2025). The works transform mass-media ephemera into spectral images—micro-reliefs that shift as one’s position changes, reminding us that the more exposed something is, the harder it becomes to see. To construct a picture, viewers must shift their stance, look again, and actively engage in perception, much like navigating today’s fractured media landscape.
The child in this piece, Noah Pozner, was the youngest victim of the 2012 Sandy Hook shooting. In the wake of his tragic death, Noah became the target of harmful conspiracy theories – online "truthers" claimed the massacre was staged, accusing grieving families of being "crisis actors" and asserting that the event was orchestrated by a shadowy "Deep State." Van der Auwera suggests this horrific event marks the transition into the post-truth era.
For over a decade, Noah’s father, Leonard Pozner, has fought to preserve his son's memory and advocate for media legislation while enduring harassment and violent threats. To protect his identity in interviews, he used prosthetics and altered lighting. These modifications, made as safety precautions for Pozner and his family, were often interpreted as evidence of deception, fueling paranoia and distrust.
The new VideoSculpture, Medusa 12.14.12, takes its title from the date of the shooting but focuses on the aftermath: how images, grief, and reality itself became weaponized. Excerpts from an interview Van der Auwera conducted with Pozner appear in the piece, but his presence is fragmented and shifting, distorted by an altered screen. Medusa 12.14.12 engages directly with the visual tactics of online conspiracy theorists, analyzing the construction of these narratives, and offering a visual metaphor for how images are picked apart, shared, and warped into new—and often dangerous—versions of truth.
Emmanuel Van der Auwera's new series, X (A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words), uses found content and commercial printing techniques to explore an unfolding relationship between image, narrative, and disinformation. The selected images are screenshots from X (Twitter), capturing early incursions of AI-generated images into mainstream online spaces. Scrolling through this collection provides a “greatest hits” of fake news that recently shaped social conversation. The series invites viewers to engage with the idea that images can obscure as much as they reveal, using strategic omissions to challenge perceptions and provoke curiosity. The X-thread cutouts create a dynamic interplay between presence and absence, compelling viewers to confront the complexities of what they see—and what remains unseen.
Van der Auwera’s practice demands engagement. His VideoSculptures invite viewers to examine the mechanics of mediation, revealing the fault lines in perception. In an era where synthetic media blurs fact and fiction, Medusa 12.14.12 raises questions about the politics of seeing: Who controls the image? What do we choose to believe? How do we construct reality when truth itself is under attack? While offering tools for visual literacy, the works in this booth move slightly away from the artist’s documentary approach, towards the activist position championed by Pozner. Again and again, the viewer is reminded: Noah was real.