Ommegang

Emma van der Put has a penchant for public spaces with specific functions. They are scripted – a kind of custom-made stage set – and they are ideal for people watching. She observes them from a distance with a coolly analytical eye. In (2012), she has fairgoers more or less mechanically pushing coins into machines. In (2015), the vagrants and waiting commuters are more expressionless than the models populating the advertising posters on the walls. The slow movement and unusual framing make these apparently trivial scenes seem somehow unreal. For 2015’s , Van der Put didn’t even handle the camera herself.  Instead she took footage from webcams on the Grand Place in Brussels – cameras that visitors to the municipal website were able to operate for 30 seconds at a time. Filming anonymously, much as Van der Put herself does with her camera, they observe the Ommegang, an annual historical spectacle. Transitions are sometimes abrupt, the image gets pixelated and the lens zooms in and out. By placing the shots in a particular order, the artist has lifted them out of the realm of neutral observation, placing them somewhere between fact and fiction.