Björn Wandels (Ghent) employs a wide spectrum of media in a hybrid practice. His work ironically questions the premises of both analog and digital media by decoupling them from their traditional context or function.
He paints photographs from the darkroom, photographs drawings, and gives sound a cinematic form. Through short videos and collage loops, he builds installations that also incorporate poetry and typography.
Björn Wandels studied photography at KASK in Ghent for several years.
Early on, he turned the camera — as an ethical act — on himself and his intimate surroundings: the parental home, the kitchen, the bedroom and the garden. His own life is the subject. The family album — that "mendacious family archive" — became his starting point for introducing the error and the inauthentic into his practice as an image-maker: ordering, reordering, deliberately disordering, distorting, against the origin. Bringing images together in an album physically shows how factual reality can be manipulated, through selection and montage, into a fictional autobiography. The radical and absurd manipulation of the image serves the creation of possibilities. For him the question is not what was, but what can come after. Seen this way, the error, the strange, the noise, the lie and the wrong are openings onto multiple other realities.
After a window presentation at DeNode (2024), his solo exhibition allesgut follows in the autumn of 2026, with an artist book of the same name published by MER Books.
