Marie José Burki

In her first comprehensive retrospective, the internationally renowned artist Marie José Burki (*1961, CH, lives and works in Brussels) highlights the relationships between image, language, narration, identity, and time. Through video and photography she questions and deciphers visual codes of images that surround us on a daily basis and influence the ways in which we interpret the world. Her videos show the apparently unspectacular--we see a young woman lying in the sun or people at a convivial picnic. These are moments frozen in time, fleeting impressions of a permanent present. Through the underlying soundtracks and theatrical structures, Marie José Burki cleverly nurtures doubt about the reality presented. Her reduced visual language communicates in sober, ironic, even humourous ways a sense of hidden connections. Caught in the artificiality of images, the protagonists make it possible for us to experience our role somewhere between accomplice and voyeur. Her latest video, "Un chien sur la route, au passage du promeneur" (2017), which was made for, among others, the Kunsthaus Pasquart, completes the selection of work from the last 22 years.