Bieke Depoorter 2015-2019

How close can a photographer get to the people they portray? What is their role with regards to their subject, and what responsibility do they assume? Bieke Depoorter’s artistic work is based on her relationships with people and her own position as a photographer. From November 22, 2019 to February 16, 2020, the NRW-Forum Düsseldorf is showing the most comprehensive solo exhibition to date of the Belgian Magnum photographer’s work in Germany. Comprising five series from 2015 to 2019, the exhibition presents the photographer, who was born in Belgium in 1986, as an artist at a turning point in her career.

Depoorter explores current social issues and questions her role as a photographer, as well as the limits of her medium, across five topical projects, some of which are ongoing. The points of departure are often chance encounters with people, some of whom she then accompanies for years, exploring how and whether one can capture a person through the means of photography, as well as how to achieve true collaboration. Her various journeys have taken her to Egypt, the USA, France, Norway, and Lebanon.

With the multimedia installation Sète#15 (2015), a nocturnal journey through the French port city, and the short film Dvalemodus (2017), Depoorter begins to project her own narratives onto other people’s reality. She visits people and photographs them in their actual private environment. She fictionalizes their representation through elements of her own story, blurring the boundary between the world of others and her own.

Bieke Depoorter has been traveling to Egypt regularly since the beginning of the revolution in 2011 for the series As It May Be, trying to find trust in these times of turmoil and suspicion, where private life is especially cherished. She asked people she met by chance if she could spend the night at their homes. Women, their husbands, and their children all shared their daily life, their food, and even their bed with her. These connections are truly important to Depoorter. Nevertheless, she became increasingly aware of her status as an outsider, both culturally and as a photographer. In 2017, she revisited the country with the first draft of this book and invited others to write comments directly onto the photographs. This resulted in contrasting views on country, religion, society, and photography from people who would otherwise probably never have encountered each other. As It May Be depicts a population in transition, full of integrity, commitment, and respect.

The ongoing series Agata began in the same year. Depoorter met the young performer in a strip club in Paris. A complex relationship developed between the two, resulting in a whole series of portraits. The work is based on a collaborative working dynamic and the agreement to “use each other.” Agata is playing with and searching for her identity while Depoorter is questioning photographic authorship. The portraits are a product of them both, of a complex relationship between photographer and subject. The two women continue to travel together and visit each other to this day. New collaborative portraits are constantly being created that tell a collaborative story and in which the demands and extremes of real artistic collaboration become visible. Together, the two explore the boundaries of illusion and truth and the complex relationships between self and other.

The series Michael is an almost detective work, which is still ongoing. Depoorter met Michael in Portland, Oregon in 2015. He gave her three suitcases full of collages and scraps of writing and then disappeared without a trace. To this day, she continues to search for him and to try to understand his life. In new installations, she works through her current examination of his disappearance and its traces. She also worked with her brother, the media artist Dries Depoorter, on a chapter of this work for the exhibition at the NRW-Forum.