APE – förlag

The series MUSA consists of twenty-six works of UV printed photographs on brass. The works are divided into three sizes which measure 150 x 200, 37,5 x 50 and 80 x 100 cm. The photographs for these works have been taken at various greenhouses in Morocco, which harvest Banana Trees. On the images we see abstract impressions of green and yellow leaves pressed against the plastic sheeting of the greenhouses. On top of that we see strips of copper wiring that keep the plastic sheets in position. It is the first series of images in Vanoverberghe’s work that solely puts the focus on the natural aspect of our surroundings. The work is a continuation in Vanoverberghe’s research to the material in which he presents his photographs.

Beautiful—for whom? Through Carla Rossi’s lens, beauty is not a fixed idea but a performance, shaped, repeated, and refined in response to the gaze of others.In Bellissima, Rossi photographs Rebecca, a young contestant she met during the Miss Italia selections, tracing her journey from casting calls to national auditions and uncovering a system driven by spectacle, competition, and the tireless pursuit of a narrowly defined ideal of femininity.The images take shape like a choreographed sequence, where the frame becomes a stage for repetition, tension, and interruption. Each gesture—a hand on the hip, a forced smile, a sideways glance—reflects the visual grammar of Italian glamour shows, commercial spectacle, and fashion: codified, internalized, and tirelessly repeated. These movements are not spontaneous; they are learned through years of watching others perform them. By juxtaposing pixelated archival footage from Miss Italia broadcasts with her own staged portraits, Rossi examines how beauty is manufactured—by television crews, by audiences, by the women themselves. In a visual culture still shaped by patriarchal ideals, Bellissima reflects on beauty not as a static result, but as a process of reframing the self as visible, staged, and always up for negotiation—but only relevant as long as someone keeps watching.
The project is supported by Strategia Fotografia 2024, promoted by the Directorate-General for Contemporary Creativity of the Italian Ministry of Culture.

“As Real As It Gets” is a photography project by Thomas Nolf exploring humanity’s need for escape through aviation culture. Between 2020 and 2024, Nolf traveled the globe, engaging with flight simulator enthusiasts, aircraft spotters, and visiting the world’s largest model airport, Miniatur Wunderland in Hamburg. During the COVID-19 lockdown, Nolf rekindled his childhood fascination with flying through Microsoft Flight Simulator, inspiring him to connect with others who similarly escape reality through aviation. Enthusiasts build elaborate home cockpits, ranging from desk setups to immersive recreations using real aircraft parts. This hobby provides a sense of control, structure, and autonomy, with some believing they could land an actual plane. The project also highlights aircraft spotters who document planes with precision. At places like Maho Beach in Sint-Maarten, spotters and tourists gather to experience low-flying planes against stunning tropical backdrops, merging thrill and beauty. Through photography, simulated images, and archival footage, Nolf examines the dreamy allure of aviation. His stylized compositions blur the lines between reality and fiction, reflecting on the romanticism and artificiality of escape.

David Black’s latest body of work extends his ongoing exploration of Western Americana into a more fluid meditation on energy, embodiment, and the inevitable impermanence of form. Here, the frame becomes a vessel for transmission, capturing not story but sensation: the spark that animates, the shimmer that moves between bodies, seen and unseen. These images invite us to consider our own physicality as a threshold - where motion becomes trace, and what lingers in the ether briefly takes shape before dissolving again into light.

Provisoria is an alternative image archive curated by Ria Verhaeghe since the early 1990s, sourced from international newspapers. Organized by keywords, dates, and thematic groupings, the archive is an effort to explore a different dimension of photojournalism. The images—often dramatic, ambiguous, or unsettling—explore the raw and layered emotional dimensions of photojournalism. With over 60,000 images, the collection spans from the striking and dramatic to the ambiguous, grotesque, and unexpectedly tender. Three sections—Human Interest, Fusion and Mindwaves—offer insight into the archive’s conceptual range.Fusion explores how we interpret images, grouping photographs by visual or symbolic qualities: featuring categories like shadows (simulacre), icons (icon), double images (glende), traces (trace), as well as those that are surreal (alien), aesthetically compelling (beauty), or energetically charged (move or MUD, for “multi-use dimension”). Mindwaves, by contrast, is structured around formal visual qualities: packaging (emballage), texture (such as Fourche, Circle, Amorf, or Geometric), and connection (connection, including subcategories like Human, Realea, and Strip). The Human Interest section (Icarus, Verticals , WWEB and Trümmerfrauen) contains images and notes focused on human emotion, empathy, and compassion.This book presents a curated selection of over 3,500 images—a glimpse into a vast and richly layered archive that reimagines how we see, sort, and understand the photographic world.The project is supported by Be-Part, Platform for Contemporary Art in Waregem and Kortrijk.

Art education is not just about teaching skills; it is about shaping perspectives, nurturing creativity, and preparing students to make meaningful contributions to society. Central to Vos’s method is trust. She emphasises the importance of students trusting her guidance and embracing the process by “taking a plunge into a jam session.” “One plus one is bigger than two,” she often says, meaning that each component must be a strong entity for the team to become a cohesive whole. By meticulously choosing her words, Vos offers feedback and advice “not to put you down, but to lift you up.” These are just a few of Ellen’s “golden sayings” featured in this publication, together with over 40 assignments she had constructed over the years. Developed in collaboration with Medina Resic, this book serves both as an archive and a guide—a collage of resources for anyone dedicated to art education.

Rotation is an ongoing photographic series exploring how urban development reshapes our relationship with space—public, personal, and imagined. It invites viewers to reconsider orientation, perspective, and the fragility of boundaries between the built environment and the body.Referencing the disorientation of outer space—where gravity dissolves the idea of ‘up’ and ‘down’—the series plays with visual perspective and suspension. Many images are shot through glass, integrating reflections that allude to invisible connections between people and places. This use of light and surface evokes a sense of weightlessness and fluid identity. Since 2021, Rotation has evolved through collaborations with over 20 organizations across cities such as London, Berlin, Stockholm, and Warsaw. With more than 70 works created so far, the project continues to map spatial perception through image-making—blurring lines between architecture, motion, and memory. This project is supported by the Female Photography Foundation.

Callemin explores what photography reveals—and what it conceals. His images question our habit of reading meaning into appearances, a process that has long shaped how we view identity. His meticulously staged photographs, using handmade sets, sculptures, and close collaborations with models, invite viewers to question what they see. In an era of AI, filters, and digital manipulation, Callemin returns to the photo studio and uses physical materials like clay and plaster to explore how perception can be deceptive. He works closely with his subjects to examine how the body is seen—or hidden—by the camera. The result is a series that challenges how we see and what we believe.

Deutsches in Deutschland is a body of work by Eoin Moylan that has been undertaken from 2020 to date. The work consists of a large body of 10x8 inch(25x21cm) photographic prints that are designed to sit side by side in congruence. The photographs have mainly been shot between Germany where the artist lives, and Ireland, where the artist is from. The project is composed of images from daily life, friends, family, travel, urban and natural landscapes. A register of personal surroundings, an archive of the elements that compose one’s experience.The family, and moments of movement, both literal and conceptual are used as a tool to begin to highlight the still images ability to reference time. The photograph’s ability to freeze time is also its ability to accentuate time passing. This experience being somewhat unique to photography, a parallel that can only be mimicked or explained by the written word or moving image. Attempting to understand the position of the photograph/photographic print in an age of hyper imagery. The work has particular emphasis on the technicality of analogue photography so as to ground it within the limitations of its practises, its monosyllabism. Attempting to speak about the strengths or weaknesses of photography by using the dialogué of the 10x8 inch print. Building a conversation between the images that is greater than the sum of its parts. Large emphasis is placed on the theory of a “national camera” and how photographic styles are influenced heavily by country or region. Research has been gathered that attempts to disseminate what an Irish ‘style of photography’ is. It being a country that falls between regional styles but is heavily influenced by the British humanist/documentary styles that came through the Newport School/David Hurn. The project attempts to understand this style and then reference a more German aesthetic of photography that has begun to influence the photographer through the technical understanding that comes through the conditioning of living within a stricter culture/ systems. On living between two places or moments.How the home, or a family or a style may change.On becoming ‘German things in Germany/Deutschesin Deutschland’.With the support of Un/Fund

Lisa Donneson’s Irreversible Order examines how memory, aging, and cultural identity cohere into visual form. Engaging Proustian cues—the scent of coffee, the warmth of freshly baked bread, remnants of a shifting American landscape—she activates desire, loss, humour, and latent trauma as material for image-making. Her use of a performative double within domestic space foregrounds the slippages between reenactment and recollection, allowing humour to unsettle the gravity of remembered experience. Through these iterative gestures, Donneson constructs a rigorous inquiry into how the self is archived, revised, and reimagined, situating the work as an exploration of interiority shaped by time.

Lusaka Street is an exploration of Zambia’s photographic past through the eyes of Zambian image-maker Alick Phiri. One of the few surviving black photographers that had access to the medium from the 1960s through the 1990s in Lusaka – a time when the use of the camera was restricted in the country – Phiri was trained at Lusaka’s Photo Art Studios before opening his own studio in Kanyama, making photography an integral part of his life. His unseen before photographic archive provides a rare insight into the everyday experience of people in the city. Even more importantly, his work is a document of the process of self-determination and self-representation of black Zambians at the time, recounted through situational portraits taken in the subject's domestic sphere. A testament to the relevance of lens-based media within Zambia’s geographical, historical and social context, a tool for reimagining the past and reading the present.

The images capture moments that arise when lost in thought, evoking a connection to memories. This sensation dwells in my chest, ascending like an elevator into my brain—the essence of my narrative.Drawing from personal experiences, I used them as the foundation. Delving into scattered memories and anxieties, I forged a nonlinear storyline centered on myself. As both narrator and subject, I embarked on a complex journey. This exploration pushed my inner and outer boundaries, confronting vulnerabilities from family ties, especially my younger sister. I faced my humanity, photographer identity and existence in the post-Soviet Muslim context.

Collages For Magazines" is the debut book by acclaimed artist and creative director, Mat Maitland. Throughout his career, Maitland has consistently created captivating imagery for a multitude of magazines. This body of work serves as a testament to his creative journey, tightly curated from 15 years of contributions across diverse publications and collaborations.Maitland led the resurgence of collage art in the early 2000s, pioneering a distinctive and singular vision in the realm of image making.“The artistic heir to Warholian tradition, recalibrated in the digital age, Mat’s work blurs the boundary between high and low culture. His collages are pop, playful, cerebral and surreal. They’re steeped in nostalgia as much as they reference future worlds, as witty commentaries on contemporary culture.” (Dazed Beauty)“Maitland’s digital renderings make the eyes skip and the mind race with their unusual juxtapositions, as he pits the futuristic against the nostalgic and the phantasmagorical against the familiar. Unusually, a quiet cerebral quality sits comfortably alongside palpable accents of pulp melodrama.” (Sotheby’s)Mat is also widely recognised for his role as a creative director in the music industry, creating designs, imagery, and films for a plethora of iconic artists including Michael Jackson, Prince, Lana Del Rey, Beck, Elton John, and numerous others.

Masashi Echigo earned his degree in architecture at Musashino Art University, Tokyo, and has lived and spent lengthy periods of time in numerous European cities, participating in collective shows over the past few years. Each experience in each place is represented by individual installations that are spatially and emotionally tied to their context. Each installation, even though conceived independently, necessarily enters into a dialogue with the others, constructing a unique narrative landscape that is in the process of evolution, serving as evidence of his voyage. Like the storyboard for a film, this allows for an unfolding of important events in the relationship between Masashi and the history, inhabitants and culture of, and dominant issues and objects in his host locations. Hans Martens: “Masashi Echigo’s work is always about physical and mental space. Or rather, the tensions, contradictions and synergy between the material and the immaterial, between the visible and the invisible, the absent and the present, the literal and what is only suggested. ” Published in collaboration with Be-Part, Waregem (B).

S. P. A. M. Office looks like a traditional modernist office setting; uniform office furniture made up of cheap, low quality – spam – materials, and a coffee machine and all its obligatory accessories being present. Nylon tie-wraps are holding the mocha colored, cheap structural furniture panels together, being an ultimate representation of the volatility of spam. The spam officers – hired by the exhibiting organization – check e-mails, detect spam, print and prepare for a proofread and finally archive the letters. They become performers, wearing the uniform and logo of the ‘firm’, taking turns in a monotonous disarmament process to which spam is subjected. Of course this company mainly develops nonsensical operations, poetically supported by the decorum of bureaucracy. The messages are stripped of their corrupt, commercial deployment. The release of this book coincides with the performance ‘S. P. A. M OFFICE’ of Pieterjan Ginckels organized by Be-Part Center for Contemporary Art, Waregem, Belgium, (May 7th till May 15th 2011). Published in collaboration with Be-Part, Waregem (B).

Since the mid-70s, Daniel Dewaele (Knokke, 1950) has followed a consistent course comprising numerous socially-engaged and -inspired art projects. On the basis of descriptions and illustrations of 43 projects, Daniel Dewaele, Selected Projects provides an almost complete survey of his work. Which makes this publication the standard work on this artist. In addition, the book offers a thorough insight into the conceptual tendencies that presented themselves in art as from the mid-70s. This unique book was created in close cooperation with the artist and appears on the occasion of an exhibition of the same name at Be-Part, Platform for Contemporary Art, in Waregem. The authors, Johan Pas and Pascal Gielen, each interpret the artist’s oeuvre on the basis of their own background, an artist who has always continued to ask how social participation could be achieved from an artistic position which by definition lies on the fringes of society. Published in collaboration with Be-Part, Waregem (B).

Art and architecture project alongside the N16 route. With projects by Tractor (Peter Aerts, Denis Dujardin, Honoré d’O, Lore Perneel, Luc Reuse, Frank Vande Veire, Hugo Vanneste, Dirk Zoete), Architecten De Vylder Vinck Taillieu, Sarah & Charles, Office Kersten Geers en David Van Severen , Michaël Vanden Abeele, Uaps, Wesley Meuris, Architecten Robbrecht en Daem, Valérie Mannaerts, Philippe Vander Maren, Richard Venlet, Ann Veronica Janssens. Text contributions by Joeri de Bruyn, Maarten Van Acker, Jeroen Boomgaard, Isabelle Makay and Oscar Van den Boogaard. Photograpy by Geert Goiris and Kristien Daem. Initiated by the cities Bornem, Puurs, Willebroek and Mechelen in collaboration with VAi, vlaamsarchitectuurinstituut.

Vermeersch’s drawings and paintings are reminiscent of a long tradition of Northern European painting inspired by masters like Breughel and Bosch. Drawing sensitively on dreams, rituals and impressions of life the artist creates meticulously crafted compositions. ”I like seeing my work as fragments and hints of lost epic times and vernacular societies, as parts or details ripped out of a larger context”, the artist says, referring to himself as a archeologist of sorts who is “in search for the story between the few scattered remains I have collected and inventoried”. The viewer is invited to be part of this search and to put together the pieces of their own story for which Tinus Vermeersch provides his finds and fragments. Tinus Vermeersch studied Painting at the Koninklijke Academie voor Schone Kunsten, Gent, 1994-96 and Sculpture at the Hoger Instituut voor Beeldende Kunsten, Sint-Lucas, Gent 1996-99. Vermeersch’s work are in many private collections and in public collections as the MuZee, Oostende, Broelmuseum Kortrijk, MUba Tourcoing France, The Franks–Suss Collection London, Vlaams Parlement Brussel, Stad Harelbeke and the Provincie West-Vlaanderen.

Les Pierres is a collection of photographs found in books combined with stock photography

Dhondt’s method of working is intensive and comprises various stages of documentation. Via Google Maps she marks places where she leaves her sculptures in public spaces. The locations of both her creations and her photography can be traced through the coordinates via internet and physical maps. Her consistent and methodical way of working, along with the creative process that takes place exclusively in the outdoor space as well as the documenting of that process is firmly rooted in movements such as Land Art and conceptual art of the 1960s and 70s. Dhondt’s work is a kind of monument to temporariness. The constructions are based on the dimensions of personal space. These spatial demarcations and primary sculptures become altered into nomadic symbols, so to speak, and function as poetic podia for resistance. Dhondt is resisting the current financial and, above all, moral crisis with a call for humaneness and a search for meaning. Lara Dhondt (Turnhout, 1979) lives in Antwerp and works with the urban landscape. She makes use of various media in her work, such as photography, installation, video, typography and performance.

The Masais are always photographed the same: jumping in nature while wearing traditional outfits and jewelry, almost like a group of animals. But more and more Masai start to live in towns and buy their first Nikes and put mobile phones in their stretched ears. Together with seven urban Masai Jan Hoek tried to find a new way to photograph the new Masai.

Still lifes, scenes and landscapes of a primeval location in Finland. During her several stays at the Art Residency Mustarinda between 2010 and 2013, Debby Huysmans found herself surrounded by and brought into contact with the old-growth forests. Late Spring shows how she uses the stories of different locals to explore this magical place, the northern nature and its meanings. Each person has his own strategy, his own dream, philosophy or opinion, but all of them are engaged with these mystical surroundings. Walking, beholding, observing, telling and collecting, are just some of the methods used to clarify the mystery of this ancient woodland and the fables related to them. This book is a complex, yet poetical narrative photographic interpretation about an ambiguous environment where nature, research and the spirits meet.

A pulsar (short for pulsating radio star) is a highly magnetised, rotating neutron star that emits a beam of electromagnetic radiation. This radiation can only be observed when the beam of emission is pointing toward the Earth, much the way a lighthouse can only be seen when the light is pointed in the direction of an observer, and is responsible for the pulsed appearance of emission. Neutron stars are very dense, and have short, regular rotational periods.

Once a month during the renovation of De Garage, Kris Van Dessel collected a sample of rubble from the site. In the period from March 2013 to December 2014, he took 22 samples in total, each of which he carefully filtered and meticulously stored in chronological order in his atelier, their temporary resting place. These were preserved in transparent containers, which started to form a stacked representation of muted earth colours showing the geological strata of the renovation’s gradual progress. The resulting stack would not have looked out of place in an archaeological research facility. The artist’s subtle presence amid all the activity of the construction site must have appeared quite inconspicuous. This tightly rhythmic series of actions manifests itself in the solo exhibition Sampled History, in which the artist has transposed the samples to the exhibition space in one simple, geo-artistic gesture. He mixes every sample of material with a specific amount of water and applies these emulsions to the walls of the exhibition space, employing a syntax of consecutive, chronological layers. Sampling means borrowing a characteristic piece of another creation with the intention of incorporating it in one’s own work. The principle was first observed in the mid-20th century in the French musical movement Musique Concrète, in which existing sounds were incorporated into sound collages. Something similar can be observed here in this context. Through the schematic, geological representation of the renovation process, the scars of former artistic productions are made visible in the epidermis of the exhibition space. The archaeology of cultural production in De Garage is gradually revealed by the artist. This intervention recalls a memory — albeit inverted — of Pierre Huyghe’s intervention piece ‘Timekeepers’. Here, the layer-after-layer exposure of erased presentations in the wall’s paintwork makes way for Van Dessel’s forensic detection of clues across the wall’s surface. The carefully-applied pigments are expertly brushed away after a certain amount of drying time has allowed the added water to evaporate. Characteristic of Van Dessel’s recent work is the recurring principle of completely returning the raw materials he has used in his artistic process to the earth. The substances are returned to their origin — like a field recording played back at the location where it was recorded. The work of Kris Van Dessel is not to be categorised as a series of manufactured artefacts bound to or positioned in an exhibition space. His work would better be described as offering cross-sections of discoveries made tangible — the results of poetic-artistic research, presented here as food for thought for the observer. In addition to the renovation works that have fundamentally changed the architecture of the spaces, Kris Van Dessel has, with the utmost discretion, created a parallel space that breaks through the established time-space continuum. It’s wonderful to get lost in his work, that is, once you’ve wormed your through the formal, syntactic trail of consecutive, chronological, two-dimensional layers; reaching the light at the end of the wormhole, you are free to reflect on what has been and what could be in the future of the safe haven that is art — now surely more essential than ever. ‘(…) In other words, to perceive the whole is to leave the fragments displaced. ’ Robert Smithson. (Beatrijs Eemans)

“In reality, as Elisabeth Ida’s photographs show, an embassy is first and foremost a place of work for the diplomats toiling there on what often are repetitive tasks, negotiating every word of a detailed technical agreement or drafting reports for the capital that might not be read but that are nonetheless expected. This side of diplomacy is associated more with dreary meeting rooms and drab offices than beautiful salons. Efforts made in waiting rooms, corridors and lobbies to convey something about the country while creating a certain homelike atmosphere come across as gauche rather than elegant. Sofas whose colour-scheme matches ill with the colours of the national flag give the impression of making do with what is available, under the watchful eye of the ubiquitous state picture of a president, king or queen, who are keen to ensure that the national budget is not wasted on undue comforts. ” (Excerpt from “The Gauche Gateway) — Prof. Dr. Sven Biscop, Ghent University & Egmont – Royal Institute for International Relations (Brussels)With the support from Cultuurcentrum Strombeek and Embassy of the Republic of Indonesia.

Lotte Reimanns (DE, 1982) Jaunt is based on a collection of nude (self-)portraits of an elderly amateur photographers couple found on a picture sharing site. Other pictures from “random” sources on the Internet were added. Reimann re-photographed them all from a computer screen. “Metal, steel, glass, leather, plastic, oil, and dirt – all agglomerated into one piece, which encloses me – blasting with tremendous speed through the landscape, is hugely exciting, arousing. ” — Lotte Reimann

Between August and November 2014 Stephanie Kiwitt was commissioned by Team Flemish Government Architect to make a photographic work about the outskirts of Brussels: Diegem, Haren, Zaventem, Sint-Stevens-Woluwe, Kraainem, Sint-Pieters-Woluwe, Oudergem, Ukkel, Vorst, Drogenbos, Ruisbroek, Sint-Pieters-Leeuw, Anderlecht, Dilbeek, Groot-Bijgaarden, Sint-Agatha-Berchem, Ganshoren, Jette, Strombeek-Bever, Grimbergen and Vilvoorde. These neighbouring but extremely different areas cannot be conceived in terms of a single unequivocal image. The composition and order of the double pages in this publication do not refer to their geographical origins, but introduce a new order and create a connection related purely to aesthetics of form.

The tension between the real world and the parallel world is intensified in these perplexing portraits of morphsuits. The design and theatricality of public space extends into the private realm. Self-design is a statement in the virtual arena that is the Internet. How do I present myself to the other’s gaze? Which lifestyle do I use to construe an imaginary identity? How can I become someone else? In their Zentai suits these morphers succeed in escaping from the obligatory, omnipresent perception, the pressure of being seen, all the time, everywhere. They are encapsulated and unrecognisable in a completely enclosed form, vanishing into a trans-human identity that suddenly infiltrates reality in the home or hotel room where Lybeer portrays them. – Inge Henneman

“Every time I went home to my apartment on the outskirts of Moscow, I passed hundreds of waiting construction workers, mostly guest workers from Central Asia, involved in the construction of the “ Elk Island” block of flats. One day, I decided to take out my camera and capture the movement of my passage and my view, and to look back. ” — For the occasion of the 4th Moscow Biennale, Debby Huysmans stayed in Moscow for a short period at the border of the Elk Island national park. Debby Huysmans’s (°BE,1980) poetic visual language mostly lends itself to rural, small pieces of marked out landscape. In Elk Island Construction Workers she wonderfully manages to translate her photographic ability to the Russian metropolis. Her landscape appears to grow smaller than before, as if she has succumbed to an inherent need of intelligibility. A seemingly unequivocal, poetic gesture. Still, again this is poetry with a sting. Shuffling and wavering, the photographer moves closer, subtle variations in the reactions become visible. Like a game, a classic game, between the maker and the portrayed, between intimacy, privacy, social order and gender. Fortunately, sometimes nature interferes, from behind the fence, that red rigorous fens. (Joachim Naudts)