Replica Falsifica

19 April - 8 July 2023

© From the series Replica Falsifica, 2023. © Paul D'Haese

Replica Falsifica is Paul D'Haese's latest project, presented for the first time at Hangar in April 2023. Conceived in the form of an artist's book, Replica Falsifica is a collection of "archetypal" images, photographs of landscapes and of objects that he found on the net and photographied. His images oscillate between fiction and reality.

The result is a "promenade" through unusual landscapes that refer to a cultural past and collective imagery. In black and white, printed on a concrete-looking cardboard and unfolding in the form of a 36-pages Leporello, Replica Falsifica looks like a collection of "false friends". The texts that accompany the images would seem to be a guide and an aid to understanding. The very opposite is true in fact, as the "poems" by the author and essayist Eric Min (BE, 1959) only add to the viewer's confusion, as they are disconnected from the images they seem to mirror. As in his previous series Winks of tangency and “Borderline”, Paul D'Haese wishes to unmask the make-believe and misleading tangent of images through this “collection” which verges on abstraction.

  • (BE, 1958) lives and works in Ternat (BE).

    An interior architect, Paul D’Haese subsequently trained as a photographer at the Academy of Sint Niklaas (1993-1997) and Anderlecht (1992-2000). He also attended a Masterclass with the photographer John Davies (UK). His work has since then been shown in various exhibitions in Belgium at the Musée de la photographie (Charleroi), Fusée de la Motographie, Contretype (Brussels), «Land of Photography» (Ghent), etc. Paul D’Haese won the Magnum Photography Award in 2016 for Belgopolis and then for Building an imaginary city in 2017. In 2018, his series Stuffy shell was selected for the Sony World Photography Awards. Borderline has been featured in numerous exhibitions, including at the Hangar in 2018 and as part of Unseen Amsterdam (September 2021), also with the Hangar. This series was awarded the national prize Photographie Ouverte at the Musée de la Photographie, Charleroi (BE). Paul D’Haese is producing a monograph for each of his series, including Borderline, co-edited with the Hangar.