FW Spotlight: Top Submissions of February
There are places where images are fixed, and others where they dissolve. Our gaze, caught between the solidity of matter and the fragility of memory, is constantly challenged by spatial illusions, crumbling archives, and realities that duplicate themselves in the digital realm. This month, three exhibitions have taken us to the very edges of the image itself, into a transitional space between persistence and disappearance, presence and evanescence.
In Berlin, Linus Rauch paints illusory windows where the sky exists only as a reflection of desire. In Brussels, François Bellabas explores AI as an ever-evolving archive, a stream that erodes the boundary between virtual and real. In Lausanne, four artists confront the loss of images, an absence that becomes a narrative in itself.
This is not a reflection on art as image production, but rather on images that erase themselves, transform, and reconfigure through space, code, and memory.
Linus Rauch – “There, Here” (Galerie im Körnerpark, Berlin)
Can a space exist only if it is perceived? The alcoves of Galerie im Körnerpark become windows, yet they open onto no landscape: they are planes of pure blue, cut-outs of a sky that does not exist. Linus Rauch works with the reverse side of billboard paper, a material designed to obscure the past—old posters, forgotten messages, vanished images. But here, the blue is not a neutral backdrop; it becomes the subject itself.
Rauch’s surfaces act as portals, suggesting escape, an elsewhere that hovers between the site’s baroque architecture and its longing for a Mediterranean utopia. His blue windows reflect nothing, yet they evoke the very desire for reflection: an unreachable sky, a nostalgia for something that never was.
Optical illusion turns into a meditation on memory and absence. We peer into these spaces, finding nothing but our own need for projection. Here, architecture transforms into pure image, an image that resists, that slips away.
François Bellabas – “unloadingoverdrive” (Contretype, Brussels)
unloadingoverdrive by François Bellabas at Contretype, Brussels, 16.01.2025 – 23.03.2025.
What remains of photography when it loses its anchor in time and space? François Bellabas immerses us in a universe of fluid, dematerialized images, generated by algorithms that mimic human vision without ever truly understanding it.
Artificial intelligence, in its way of processing and replicating the visible, creates an archive in perpetual revision. The exhibition’s title, unloadingoverdrive, suggests an overburdened memory that must constantly erase itself to be updated. This is the condition of our time: a ceaseless flow of images that renew, overwrite, and replace the past in an infinite cycle.
Inside the exhibition, visitors step into a hybrid space where the physical and the virtual merge. Videos, photographs, digital sculptures, and generative environments overlap, forming a landscape in constant flux. Here, the boundary between image and reality dissolves: what we see is never stable but always in transition.
Bellabas does not merely use AI as a tool, he interrogates it. Can a machine without personal memory truly create meaningful images? Or are we the ones projecting our sense of the past onto these fragmented visuals, searching for something familiar in an archive that does not belong to us?
Zuzana Baková, Nina Pacherová, Iulia Bucureșteanu, Noah Ismael Wyss – “i’ve lost every photo that i took since 2012” (Sébeillon, Lausanne)
What if digital memory crumbled? If every archived image, every captured moment, every trace of the past were suddenly erased? This collective exhibition explores the trauma of digital loss, the fear of an archive that vanishes.
The title itself is a confession: i’ve lost every photo that i took since 2012. Behind these words lies the anxiety of an era in which our memory is entrusted to fragile devices and distant servers, both vulnerable and inaccessible. The exhibition unfolds as a fractured narrative, a flow of thoughts and textual fragments sourced from online forums where real people lament corrupted archives, missing photos, and altered timelines.
The loss of images is not just a technical issue, it is an existential crisis. What remains of our identity if our digital traces disappear? What does it mean to live in an age where every moment is captured and stored, yet nothing is truly secure?
In this installation, objects become relics, documents turn into ghosts, and the very notion of an archive becomes unstable, constantly shifting. Memory, once solid, now proves as volatile as the code that preserves it.
An Unstable Archive
These three exhibitions depict a world where the image is no longer fixed but transient. Linus Rauch uses architecture to evoke windows onto a non-existent sky, an illusion of memory. François Bellabas deconstructs photography itself, revealing images that endlessly regenerate like an archive in perpetual update. Zuzana Baková and her collaborators take us to the heart of a contemporary fear: the disappearance of our digital memories, the erosion of the past in a universe dominated by ephemeral data.
Across these works, the central question remains: what is left when the image disappears? When the window closes, when the server shuts down, when memory empties itself? Perhaps, in our attempt to fix reality in place, we are only chasing the reflection of a sky that was never there to begin with.
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Founded in 2021, Fakewhale advocates the digital art market's evolution. Viewing NFT technology as a container for art, and leveraging the expansive scope of digital culture, Fakewhale strives to shape a new ecosystem in which art and technology become the starting point, rather than the final destination.
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