David Brognon (along with his collaborator Stépanie Rollin) while touching upon existential experiences brings particular focus to the rites and laws of the street with its subcultures, metaphors and codes.
Subtly woven into many of his works is the tension between the submerged reality of the public space and the multifaceted ways in which it is habitually used. Inviting ambiguous readings, he uses poetic imagery as a means for engaging with the contradictory nature of human experience without affirming it or trying to interpret it didactically ? a pursuit Hans Magnus Enzensberger summed up with: “Poetry is a contradiction, not an affirmation of existing conditions.”
Focusing his gaze on the outer limits of our awareness; he travels in dialogue with the people who are pushed to society’s fringes and gives junkies, hooligans, house squatters, the homeless and immigrants space to display their own stories.
He renders his work in material form in videos, photos and objects, but also in room-filling installations, all of which take recourse in their open-ended structure to the primordial experiences of human existence: experiences of the dark side of life, of fate, death, and violence, as well as positive experiences such as hope, poetry and light, playing a key role throughout. David Brognon symbolically brings shadows out into the light, working insightfully with the “liminal spaces” of interpretation.

Date	2013.05.02 - 2013.06.29
Place	Residence 1