Born in Leopoldsburg, Belgium (1970).
Annick Geenen is a visual artist, photographer and lecturer at LUCA School of Arts.
She holds an MFA in Visual Arts, Media & Design Academie, Genk, Belgium and a Certificate of pedagogical competence from the Flemish Ministry of Education and Training. She also studied Fine Arts Photography at the Higher Institute for Visual Communication & Industrial design in Genk. In 1991-’92 she was the assistant of fashion photographer Marcel van der Vlugt in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. She was also a resident in the workplace of the multidisciplinary artist Jan Fabre, for two years, for choreography and scenography training. After that period she worked for seventeen years as a freelance photographer and has always had an art practice as an extension of her teaching activities.
Her work is best described as visual storytelling, between narration and fiction. She has always been interested in the way photography influences our perception of time, scale and space. She works as a collector of memories using photography and objects. In her practical research, she focuses on the experience of memories, punctum, connections between space, time, presence and absence, loss, traces, remains in time as expressed through art. Photography freezes the subject and crystallizes it in a very unchanging place. Hereby she presents the question of perception differently, by freezing reality, by taking a distance from it, another form of perception appears. The starting point of her practice-based research are events and the concept of memory and perception. Stories that question the reliability of memory, imagination and reason, blurring the distinction and exposing the provisional nature of photographic language as a means of communication. She build a narrative where fact and fiction transform reality and reflects on a place where illusions are at stake. Annick Geenen observes, writes and photographs in a similar dynamic. The stringing together of ideas and photographs in small, medium and large format is always the core of her output. With her work she slows down time. She asks herself pertinent questions about the world that surrounds us. Her often explicit references to the point-of-view, the staging and placement of the characters, the delay and disclosure mechanisms question how we experience its long-term sensorial experience, allowing the story to unfold without interference.
She has forged multiple collaborations with choreographers, fashion designers, various magazines and companies in Europe. Her images has been extensively shown in Europe and exhibited in the collections of Veronique Branquinho, Raf Simons, Anke Loh, Heaven Tanudiredja, Alex Schrijvers, Harvey Bouterse, Wouter Hoste, Revital Avidar, Hideki Seo, Ilia Eckardt, Hilde Frunt, Essential Antwerp, Scabal, Luciano Benetton, Eastpak Simons, Kathleen Missotten, Casimir, Modenatie Antwerp, Anne Pastré, Delvaux, The Flanders Fashion Institute (FFI), Designers Against Aids and much more. Her work has been included in solo and group exhibitions at Vooruitzicht Antwerp, Fashion Museum Hasselt, De Warande Turnhout, Gallery S & H De Buck, the Flemish Parliament, Campo & Campo Art Gallery and various cultural centers in Flanders. Her pictures have been published in VISION magazine, Kwintessens, ISEL art and culture magazine, dS Magazine, Knack Weekend magazine, Blend, AAA art magazine, De Lichte Kamer, Designers Against Aids (Ludion), Moi Veronique Branquinho Toute Nue (MoMu) , Delvaux (Lannoo), Contradictions: 350 Years Antwerp Academy, The Fashion Book (Phaidon) and The Rage of Staging (Lannoo).
Annick Geenen is a lecturer in the academic Bachelor and Master program of Visual Arts at LUCA School of Arts campus C-Mine in Genk since 2004.
Legal Notice
© Annick Geenen. All photographs herein, are copyrighted by the artist, no part of this website or any of the content may be used or reproduced in any manner without the permission of the copyright holder.