Lightness (DU-EN, signed and numbered copy)

Knokke-Heist through the eyes of photographer Frieke Janssens

“Janssens’s new photo seriesLightness is teeming with contradictions, dualities and ambiguities. Her photos are both unbearably light and unbearably heavy. It opens the door to a series of new ideas on our desire to escape, our lack of a sense of reality, and our superficiality.”

– Thijs Demeulemeester

With Lightness Frieke Janssens has created a cathartic photo series, tapping into our urge to escape and our individual quest for a sense of purpose and meaning. Her compositions explore the visual dichotomy between weightlessness and gravity, water and air, aesthetics and imperfection. Using the sea and its eternal ebb and flow as a backdrop, the photographer contemplates the universally human. To what extent can we ever know or understand each other?

This exclusive numbered and signed leporello is published on the occasion of the exhibition Lightness, which runs at Cultural Centre Scharpoord, Knokke-Heist from 26 March to 12 June 2022. Its publication coincides with ‘Foto Knokke-Heist’.

With contributions by Sofie Crabbé, Lize Spit and Thijs Demeulemeester.

In the past twenty years, Frieke Janssens (Bruges, b. 1980) has made a reputation for herself, both in Belgium and abroad, with striking, staged photos and evocative series such as Smoking Kids (2011), Your Last Shot (2012), Dianas (2015) and Animalcoholics (2016). Her photos often start from her own imagination, rather than reality. She uses her studio like a painter uses his canvas. In it, she can fully control all the photographic parameters, including light, the composition, her models, the setting and the backdrop.