10 individual images; digital black & white C-Type prints framed in black frames without glass.

The series begins with an associated press-image of a concentration camp in East-Germany, which I culled from a private photographic archive based in London. I translated this image into a life-size model in the studio, following the same spatial arrangements and dimensions of the archive image. The reconstruction allowed me to produce a digital image of the space of the archive image.

Different digital software programs, which transform or erase information of the image, are applied to the same digital image. This process results in the deformation of the image and creates several fragmented versions of the same image. By digitally corrupting the image file, the image becomes fractured and transformed into a kind of non-photograph in which the digital pixels of lines and erased information become blanks in the photographic record. Beun suggests that the photographic image(s) pictures a void and articulates a sense of loss.

According to Sigmund Freud, trauma demands repetition, which results in the behavioral enactment and automatic repetition of the past: He reproduces it not as a memory but as an action; he repeats it without, of course, knowing that he is repeating... he cannot escape from this compulsion to repeat; and in the end we understand that this is his way of remembering.

Beun forces the viewer to hover over each individual image in order to combine all the fragments into one image. The effect of these uncanny fragmentations is to de-stabilise our understanding of this historically charged site. The digital manipulations of the image question the slippages of our memory and evocatively reflect on the way we reconstruct our sense of the past. Subverting traditional photographic techniques, Beun investigates exciting new languages of photographic image-making that are emerging in the second digital revolution.

Feature of Steffi Klenz as artist, including discussion of work Beun, in Elephant Magazine, issue 29, December 2016.

Featured in book, 'Beg, steal and borrow: artists against originality' by Robert Stone, Laurence King Publishing, October 2017, p. 136-138.

Participating artists in the group exhibition 'The Data Battlefield', include David Birkin, Harun Farocki, Forensic Architecture, and Steffi Klenz.

Images of conflict have become a common phenomenon, due to 24-hour repetitive news broadcasts and social media. As an answer to society's increasing desire to capture and disseminate images of conflict, sites of dispute are no longer censored in any form but rather made into media spectacles. How, then, can we describe traumatic events or classified sites without veering into sensationalism?

The Data Battlefield shows how four international lens-based artists relate to this question. Through some of the latest technology, David Birkin (UK, 1977), Harun Farocki (DE, 1944-2014), Forensic Architecture and Steffi Klenz (DE, 1979) each open up unique conversations about our current photographic and filmic culture in relation to environments of conflict.

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