Ingel Vaikla “Shapes and Distances”

Seeing double: Estonian-born, Belgium-based artist Ingel Vaikla overlaps past and future, time and space in her audio-visual investigation of the subjective and the collective.

In her first solo exhibition in Belgium, Ingel Vaikla conceptualises her work through the idea of the double exposure. We see archival footage of the city of Slavutych, the last city ever built by the Soviet Union, and we see it now as a young city in present-day Ukraine. In this way Vaikla invites us to let these overlapped realities develop simultaneously in our minds. If we have the courage to climb through the image, through time, space and experience, then we can start to understand how subjective and collective identities are formed, and how they in turn materialise on film, in politics and in architecture.