Curator statement - Inge Henneman on Charlotte Lybeer

In her powerful images Charlotte Lybeer documents the experience of today’s living in a highly artificial world. Her works focus on the staged and controlled environments of gated communities and theme parks. As a photographer Lybeer combines the curiosity of the journalist researching actual phenomena – symptoms of the global, capitalist crisis – the empathy of the detective infiltrating enclosed worlds, and the sensibility to capture the way fiction transforms reality. LARP, Lybeers new portrait series on view in ‘de Brakke Grond’ Amsterdam in november, is not about eccentric people. Instead she imagines the isolation and stillness of her subjects, their escapist desire to become the character of a dream, shaped by film, virtual reality and games. In these portraits the everyday environment clashes with the fictive identity of the subjects, a self more pure perhaps than the ‘original’?

Inge Henneman is freelance curator and professor photohistory at the Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp.