We are delighted to present ‘Waiting for our Sight’, a solo exhibition of Belgian artist Anton Kusters at IN-DEPENDANCE, as the official opening exhibition of our new adventure.

Anton Kusters, born in Hasselt in 1974, is fascinated by the human condition and transmission between generations. Remnants of fragmented narratives, the act of post-witnessing and the loss of experience of place are at the core of his practice. Ranging from single autonomous pieces to large-scale projects, Kusters works across different media and creates installations that present themselves as alternate, fragmented narratives through complex themes such as time, solace, hope and doubt. He draws upon events, biographies and objects within his own family, connecting them to larger political and social histories, digital data and underlying patterns. His work 'The Blue Skies' has been exhibited at Victoria & Albert Museum, Les Rencontres d’Arles, Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, The Photographers’ Gallery, among others.

In ‘Waiting for our Sight’, Anton Kusters unveils a series of works that poetically weave themes of time, humanity, generational trauma, destruction, and the moral complexities of war. Starting with ‘The Blue Skies Project’ (2018), where he captured blue skies over 1078 former Nazi concentration camps, Kusters further delves into the forgotten firebombing of Japanese cities with napalm in 1945. The ‘Blue Lines’ (2024) paintings reflect on the notion of 'borrowed time', depicting the atomic bomb’s aftermath in indigo cloth patterns, symbolising victims’ radiation burns. These works contemplate the inevitability of time and the passage of generations. In ‘Inter, Remnants’ (2024), Kusters uses lidar scanning to capture ephemeral, eerie images of the Hiroshima eucalypt tree, evoking the haunting aftermath of the napalm bombings. The tree reappears in a video piece, ‘Eucalypt Story’ (2024), overlaying dialogue from the 1953 film ‘Tokyo Story’ with slow-motion footage of the Hiroshima tree, extending an apocalyptic moment. The ongoing ‘Zero’ series (2021-) examines dust, scratches, and fingerprints, reflecting on loss and our perception of time. These enlarged prints of the back of polaroids from ‘The Blue Skies Project’ are now a tabula rasa, patiently waiting for our sight.

During the vernissage on Saturday 7 September Anton Kusters will have an artist talk at 16:00, with which IN-DEPENDANCE will also be officially opened.

Artists: Anton Kusters