Without Trace

De Pont collection

16 March 2021 - 30 January 2022

In Without Trace, the new presentation of the collection, photographs of impressive Canadian forests and hazy expanses in Ireland hang alongside photographs of railroad tracks in North America and the rippling surface of the Thames. Not only are these seductive or intriguing views; above all, they silently attest to events that once occurred at these sites. In the recent past, or long ago, they were marked by war, colonialism or acts of violence. And even though no trace of such history remains visible, the memory of it lies rooted in the landscape forever. 

Without Trace refers to a work (2013) from the Northern Irish artist Willie Doherty. ‘What cannot be seen cannot be photographed either,’ says Doherty about the way in which he refers, in his work, to the fierce conflict that erupted in Northern Ireland during the 1960s. Although the violence remains unseen in his photographs and films of dark and desolate country roads, barbed wire and blocked streets, there is indeed a sense that it can strike at any moment.

Stan Douglas is often drawn, in his work, to what he calls 'the minor histories of a place': stories that have taken place somewhere, have made an area what it is, but which ultimately were not kept alive. In his photographs from The Nootka Sound Series (1996) he sheds light on the western coast of Canada, over which Spanish and English colonialists fought during the eighteenth century. That history did stay alive. But the original inhabitants, the 'Native Canadians', were forgotten. In his photographs Douglas allows them to stand out by way of their absence.

Precisely by giving emphasis to the silence and emptiness of an image, artists take it beyond current events. Proof of that is the video Unexploded (2007) which Steve McQueen produced in response to his trip to Iraq in 2003. He could have aimed his camera directly at the violence and the drama taking place around him. But instead he filmed a bombarded building. The heart of the structure was gone, but its slanted, sunken facade remained upright as a battered carcass. He could not have expressed the impact of war more succinctly or powerfully. Something similar happens in Gravesend (2007), a film about miners in Congo who dig up valuable minerals for our computers and telephones. McQueen does not record the oppression that lies beneath this new form of colonialism. On the contrary, he draws the viewer into a highly poetic and seductive montage of the miners at work and combines this with sterile images of high-tech industry. As such he makes the observer complicit but, at the same time, gives him the time and space to draw his own conclusions.

The artists selected for Without Trace rarely adopt a standpoint. They gravitate alternately toward beauty and the unbearabletruth. The power of their works lies with the very tension that arises between documentation and suggestion. For no matter how realistic the images may look, they are almost always documentary forms of fiction aimed mainly at stimulating the viewer's imagination.