11 seconds

Ten seconds is the average length of time a museum visitor looks at an artwork. For the duration of the performance 11 seconds, Charlotte Bouckaert and her audience look at a single photograph: an exterior view of the Guggenheim Museum in New York.

Charlotte Bouckaert has a fascination for photography. In her performances she uses the camera in such a way that our attention is drawn not to the photograph itself, but the action that precedes its making. Or, as in the performance 11 seconds, a photograph is given new life through unexpected stories.

On the stage is a work table with paper, scissors, paint … the studio of a bricoleur. A video camera projects what is happening on the table’s surface onto the back wall. The performer shifts and turns the photograph continuously, refocusing our reading of the image. For Bouckaert, the photograph of the Guggenheim Museum is the starting point for a playful exploration of our ways of looking at art, of the relationship between art and reality, of the museum as an institution, of photography and transience … First and foremost, 11 seconds is an ode: to art itself, to artists and to our strained attempts to say something meaningful about art.

Charlotte Bouckaert is a visual artist, performer, and scenographer. From 2015 to 2019 she was part of Atelier Bildraum.