David Claerbout has been working on the entry and existing points between photography and film that has become the fo re front of this contemporary dialogue. Trained as a painter, he is best known for presenting vintage black and white photography through large-scale and silent projection. Over the years, he has grown further interests in the visualization of time. From his early works such as Kindergarten Antoinio Sant’Elia, 1932 in 1998 to The Algiers’ Sections of A Happy Moment (2008), Claerbout investigated the nature of time by offering a chance to experience the convergence of the two mediums -photographic and filmic images- that co-exist and occupy the same object simultaneously. Featuring more than 600 images taken from a small soccer field on a rooftop of the casbah of Algier, with a view by the Mediterranean Sea, this film represents a narrative collection of photographs that capture the still images of people. These series of images of a ‘happy moment’ reflect the artist’s ambition to open up ‘the suspicious gaze’ and re-consider our own fixation against a particular group of people.
