Distorted view - Solo exhibition

Photography is at the centre of Lulay's artistic production and research, but rather than producing photographs for their own sake, she is interested in the role that photography plays in our daily lives: what motivates us to take photographs, how does photography shape our view of the world and our concepts of reality, and how is the information in an image transformed when it leaves the personal context in which it was produced? Fully aware of today's overproduction of images, Lulay collects photos of friends and strangers from flea markets, flea markets and the Internet and mixes them with her own images. For her, photographs are a "raw material" that she processes and manipulates using various techniques. Her collages and installations, paintings and videos break the two-dimensional surface of the photograph and confront us with a fragmented, multi-layered world full of trompe l'oeil effects. Thus, Lulay's works challenge our perception and invite us to question the direct link we tend to assume between a photographic image and the reality it represents. All the works in the exhibition confront us with the strange feeling that there must be something else to see, something that happened before or after, something that is hidden underneath but that we cannot access. Lulay's works emphasise that a photograph is nothing more than a rectangular visual cut-out and that, therefore, each photograph shows as much as it hides. Or, as the German philosopher Hans Belting says: "There is no point in pointing the camera at the world: there are no images out there. We only create them (or have them) within ourselves". In an age in which we are bombarded with images of all kinds, Lilly Lulay's work should also be understood as a call not to be seduced by images, but to take the time to look more closely at what is shown in order to form one's own image.