Family Pictures

Multimedia artist, performer and activist Christine Clinckx combines actuality and history in her installations and photographic work. Her photographic prints are made with an early 20th century large-format camera obscura using a 19th cen-tury wet-plate collodion process. The artworks are part of an ongoing project based on a combination of found landscape photographs and family pictures. By cutting these images up and then manipulating them, their original meaning and function are disturbed and trans-formed, with ghost-like figures haunting landscapes of the past. Clinckx combines historical and contemporary photographic techniques, giving rise to serendipitous and evocative imperfections – streaks, scratches, spots, and pits that estrange the original subject. Clinckx‘s work shows how the past continuously penetrates the present and how we relate to this interaction between contemporary events and personal expe-riences, combining anonymous historical sources of familial relationships with private autobiographical narratives and critical engagement. Referring both lite-rally and figuratively to the passage of time, capturing tensions between nature and history.