The Quiet Shore

For the 19th Biennale of Sydney (2014), David Claerbout’s The Quiet Shore (2011) was shown at the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia. Set on the coastline of Brittany, France, The Quiet Shore is a beautifully shot 36-minute black-and-white film capturing scenes that range from moments of minute detail to panoramic expanses of coastal landscape. The viewer experiences, frame by frame, a single moment from a multitude of different perspectives and viewpoints.

Slow-moving and silent, The Quiet Shore induces the mood of its title. Unlike film, silence is part of the nature of still photography and Claerbout adopts it here to fuel contemplation. The people who populate his frame are united by their distinctive gazes. Whether they are gazing at each other or out to sea, they seem to share a desire to witness, but what they are looking at remains unclear. Their attentiveness links to our own as observers waiting for something to happen. For those both within and watching Claerbout’s film, the duration of the work feels like a breath held in unison.

Claerbout initially trained as a painter, attending the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp from 1992 to 1995. He abandoned drawing and painting altogether in the final year of his postgraduate degree, opting instead to collect and work with found photographic objects. Now, more than 20 years later, he uses film, photography and digital media to blur the boundaries between still and moving images in an exploration of the nature of temporality.

Claerbout has stated that through his work he is mostly trying to articulate time as something bigger than us, or maybe broader. Time is a near-tangible substance in many of his works, almost appearing as a character in its own right. Some of his pieces play with the audience’s perception of time by manipulating imagery and endowing still images with movement, or by drastically slowing down moving images. Other works use an amalgamation of real-time footage and repetition to accentuate a sense of time passing, such as Bordeaux Piece (2004). Here, Claerbout created a 14-hour film comprised of 70 nearly identical short films of 10 minutes duration. The piece is a study of time, composition and light; shadows shift throughout the frame as the sun rises at the beginning of the film and sets towards the end. The changing light gives the audience the impression of time elapsing while the characters remain trapped in repetition.

In a more recent work titled Sunrise (2009), Claerbout continues his experimentation with light as an atmospheric signifier, presenting an 18-minute work in near-darkness, accentuating the dim tones by projecting the film on to a grey surface. For nearly the entire film a housemaid goes about her chores in the muted light of pre-dawn, finally departing the house and cycling through a dimly-lit landscape. The unexpected culmination occurs when, accompanied by the strains of Rachmaninoff’s Vocalise, the sun rises in a piercing burst of light that leaves the viewer with a hopeful sense of the protagonist’s world.

Claerbout has exhibited prolifically worldwide, with solo exhibitions including ‘Interfruit’, Galerie Yvon Lambert, Paris (2013); ‘Diese Sonne strahlt immer’, Vienna Secession (2012); ‘David Claerbout: Architecture of Narrative’, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2011); ‘The Time That Remains’, WIELS Contemporary Art Centre, Brussels (2011); ‘uncertain eye’, Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich (2010); and ‘David Claerbout. The Shape of Time’, Centre Pompidou, Paris (2007). His work has also been included in prestigious international group exhibitions, among them Sharjah Biennial 11 (2013); 5th Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art (2013); and 29th São Paulo Biennial (2010).