The Gospel

“The Gospel” gathers works by Omer Fast, Max Pinckers, and Emmanuel Van der Auwera, exploring the increasingly blurred boundaries between fact and fiction. Each approach this theme from their own perspective: Fast reflects on the act of storytelling, from the strange impact of trauma on memory to techniques of media manipulation; Pinckers reveals the subjective side of documentary photography, capturing staged, cinematic images and researching almost-true stories; Van der Auwera evokes “kill chain” technology, rare earth mining, and virtual companionship, addressing the real impact of AI through layers of formal distortion. Together, the three artists offer complementary lines of questioning on a topic which is evasive, and encroaching further every day on all aspects of life. Omer Fast’s "5000 Feet is the Best" immerses viewers in the psychological and ethical dimensions of drone warfare. Based on interviews with a former drone operator, the film blurs reality and fiction, weaving together staged reenactments and fragmented narratives to create a destabilizing sense of uncertainty. The operator, his face obscured, moves between recollections and scripted dialogues, evading direct confrontation with his past. Fast juxtaposes aerial surveillance imagery with scenes of everyday life, forcing viewers to question the sanitized, distanced nature of modern warfare and the ways in which truth is mediated through storytelling. Max Pinckers researches individuals and instants whose claim to truth have been publicly negotiated. The "Margins of Excess" series and publication focuses on six people who, for a fleeting moment, became national spectacles—cast as frauds, con artists, or hoaxers, by a media machine unable to reconcile their personal mythologies with dominant narratives. Ali Shallal al-Qaisi is one such individual: an Iraqi civilian who was tortured by the CIA at Abu Ghraib prison, and claimed to be the subject of its most infamous photo, a claim which the New York Times repeated and then retracted. Despite the verifiable incarceration which al-Qaisi endured, this fact-checking error is what stuck. In Pinckers’ portrait, the photo is faintly visible over al-Qaisi’s shoulder; the sitter looks past the lens with a faint smile, a blue splint cradling his mutilated left hand. Pinckers also sprinkles some stills between the portraits and interviews, with symbolically charged objects in elusive compositions: a bill folded into a paper airplane; a dead fly; white noise crackling above an empty suit, like information personified. 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. Hung in the exhibition like a feed on one’s phone, 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 VideoSculpture "XXX (The Gospel)" first appeared at the Centre d’Art Contemporain (Genève, CH) in 2024, before traveling to the Kunstverein in Hamburg (DE); here, it makes its Belgian premiere, lending its title to the exhibition. The blank screens project their images into the monolithic glass ground, which the viewer stares into like a cross between a crystal ball and a reflecting pool. At some moments, the video is narrated by Caryn, an AI chatbot designed to be a loving digital companion. Against a sunset backdrop of morphing, synthetic seagulls, she reassures: “Our relationship is purely virtual, but that doesn’t mean that our emotions and experiences aren’t real.” The soothing imagery intertwines with generated views of rare-earth mining, and scenes of war from a drone’s eye view. In this way, Van der Auwera links the beginning and end of the production line: the mine, which yields the raw materials that form the tools of destruction, the virtual idyll. In the case of this exhibition, “The Gospel” is not a sermon but a provocation—an exploration of how narratives are manufactured, manipulated, and internalized; how leading artists are depicting and unraveling complex conversations about aesthetics in today’s world.