ECHTZEIT

ECHTZEIT is made in collaboration with Dirk Braeckman and the FOMU in line with his impacting solo show with the Collections department, curated by Tamara Berghmans. ECHTZEIT offers a unique glimpse into Dirk Braeckman's most recent photographs, accompanied with the museum's collection and texts written by Clément Chéroux, director of the Foundation Henri Cartier-Bresson and Tamara Berghmans, curator of the exhibition.

Dirk Braeckman defies easy description: leading contemporary Belgian photographer whose work is part of numerous collections across the globe and has been exhibiting worldwide for four decades. Braeckman is notorious for his silverish-grey-toned, large-scale prints and has been seeking to manipulate the medium of photography since he began over forty years ago, drawing out a certain slowness and space within his work. Braeckman is not a pursuer of the image, more so he is a creator of the image, selecting fragments of reality that are worked out in the darkroom into unique prints. His methodology therefore shifts him between two areas: photographer and painter. His palette is always muted, except for a selection of colored prints, and the subject almost always disappears into the print, like reminiscents of ghosts passing through the eyes, with no name, and no narrative. The totality of his work, and therefore his archive is immediately distinguishable. Due to this, Braeckman has a set of outstanding achievements including long-term representation by the prestigious Zeno X Gallery in Antwerp (closing December 2023) as well as with other galleries such as GRIMM and Galerie Thomas Fischer and more. In 2017, Dirk Braeckman represented Belgium at the 57th Venice Biennale and The Royal Family of Belgium commissioned a permanent installation in the Sphinx Room of the Royal Palace in Brussels. In 2021 Braeckman took part in the 34th Bienal de São Paulo ‘Though it’s dark, still I sing’.