‘A Chance Encounter’ with Bieke Depoorter at the Photographers’ Gallery London
By Matilda Kay
This summer in London, the Photographers’ Gallery exhibited a deeply complex and still unfolding body of work, entitled ‘Michael’, from the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize-nominated artist Bieke Depoorter (b. 1986, Belgium). Taken from her project ‘A Chance Encounter’, ‘Michael’ – consisting of a short film and an investigation room – seeks to explore the intricate ethical issues surrounding the possibility and impossibility of truth, as well as issues surrounding the fraught relationship between personal and professional boundaries. The 31-minute film investigates the life of ‘Michael’, a man who Depoorter met on the streets of Portland, Oregon in 2015. The film follows Depoorter’s immersive but worryingly obsessive search for him, continuously haunted by his removed presence.
The project from which ‘Michael’ was conceived, ‘A Chance Encounter’, reflects the development of enduring personal relationships through a detailed interrogation of the photographic medium, borne of the artist’s own chance encounters with accidentally meaningful people. In this sense the project is beautiful, careful, hopeful. Connections are everywhere; people long to share their lives and stories.
Framed through accidental encounters, Depoorter’s work acts as a testimony to the people she has crossed paths with – those who have walked together and those who are lost to her (and perhaps to themselves). The work indicates the artist’s own loneliness, projected on to another ‘character’. It’s easy to imagine that she might have been extremely vulnerable when she met Michael for the encounter to have sparked such restlessness within her. She is consumed by it, just as Michael was consumed, as we learn from the film, by his own dissatisfaction and contempt for life.
Bieke Depoorter, Michael at home, Portland, Oregon, USA, May 2015.
Before his disappearance, Michael led an obsessive life characterised by emotional extremes and personal struggles with identity, society, romance, religion, and mental health. This is a man plagued by, or perhaps absorbed by, the complex nature of modern life. On their first meeting, we learn from the film that Michael invited Bieke into his house where she found walls plastered with memorabilia and ephemera – this was Michael’s own conceptional universe where he at once dissected, examined, and reconstituted his life. The seductive rhythm and pull of Depoorter’s own exhibition emerges within Michael’s personal investigation room – his mighty presence is inescapable.
Bieke Depoorter, We walked together, Portland, Oregon, USA, May 2015.
Through ‘Michael’, a series of questions emerge about the very nature of the photographic medium: about its obsessive quality, the need to track, to contain, to document. The film is an unmoving series of stills taken by Depoorter, punctuated by her own commentary and a handful of testimonials from people who knew, or thought they knew Michael. It feels weighted, inexplicably mythological, and – quite honestly – confusing. The viewer, not fully understanding Depoorter’s psychology or absolute devotion to Michael, a bipolar and admittedly unsympathetic character, is overwhelmed by the sheer volume of information offered between the film and the wider space.
Echoes of Michael, eccentric and eerie, bounce around the room. It is strange to read so much personal information about someone who you have never met. Is it right to be so invasive? Is it appropriate to clinically observe someone’s life as though it were a study, holding it at arm’s length as if it were something distant and unreal? ‘Michael’ shows that you can be greedy with someone else’s life, that without their intervention, an artist can twist the narrative into something unrecognisable. Depoorter may not do it maliciously, but what she does is dangerous: there is a sense that she has lost not only Michael, but also elements of herself. She has inhabited the space that he left behind. One is left to wonder how much of this is an elaborately constructed figment of the artist’s imagination – the erection of an epic figure.
Entering the low-lit exhibition space, one is immediately transported to what feels like a mythic new world. There is something here that feels religious, confessional even. It’s a world coloured by obsession, confusion, doubt, and compulsion – yet it has cumulative power, sucking you in. Time feels thin and contorted. You think perhaps one minute has passed, but you have lost ten. A bench is situated in the middle of the room, inviting you to sit down and begin to participate with Depoorter in the unsettling dissection of Michael’s failed life. It’s uncomfortable, but you struggle to look away. It feels as though you are watching a crime documentary, seeing something macabre unfold. The film has a curious hypnotic sway, the rhythm injected by Depoorter’s narrations seeks to render you still. In this investigation room, time seems to lose all agency and urgency – onlookers move around in a trance, seemingly now characters in Depoorter’s narration.
Bieke Depoorter, Michael, first suitcase, Portland, Oregon, USA, May 2015.
The space surrounding the film, just like in Michael’s house, is Depoorter’s own self-proclaimed investigation room, and marries the memorabilia gifted by Michael with her own mountain of research. Her work and research seem sporadic, with no discernible pattern, spilling both under and over the glass barrier that sets it into the wall – tendrils reaching to make you complicit in this reimagination of Michael’s life. Within his life, Michael had obsessive tendencies that prevented him from forming two-sided relationships, reducing him to a hermit. Obviously, through this myriad of physical information, Depoorter must see his tendency for fixation, physically witnessing the damaging consequences through conversations she had with people from his past. What is it that has pushed her to mirror his behaviour, despite knowing that it will be destructive. Is it part of human nature to do things that will ruin us?
Despite Depoorter’s noble and ongoing efforts, Michael remains an undefinable figure. The room itself is haunted by his elusive presence, hard to pin down and impossible to understand. Many will leave this room with more questions than when they first entered, but mirroring Depoorter’s calls for Michael’s reappearance, they remain unanswered. This is the crux of the exhibition – the pull of the unknown, an inexplicable longing for more.
Images courtesy of Magnum Photos and the Photographers’ Gallery websites.