Bert Danckaert
(°1965, Antwerp, Belgium)
studied photography at the Academy for Fine Arts and the National
Higher Institute for Fine Arts (NHISK) in Antwerp (B). Since the mid
nineties, he has been working as a photographer and has showed his work
in several solo and group exhibitions in Belgium and abroad.
Besides his artistic
activities, Danckaert also writes about photography for several newspapers and magazines (mainly <H>ART) and has worked as freelance curator. He teaches photography and photographic history at the Academy of Antwerp.
Bert Danckaert is POC (Piece of Cake) member, a European collective of photographers.
In 1999, Danckaert started the series 'Make Sense!' which was published as a book in 2006.
From 2006 on he is working on a series entitled 'Simple Present'. In 2008 his second book 'Simple Present - Beijing' was published.
We
see in Bert Danckaert’s work a strangely familiar universe: that of
the unremarkable, undistinguished places in which all of us spend so
much of our lives, places we pass through without giving them any
notice, spaces that are just trajectories, parts of a line connecting
one place with another. Places, in short, that define our lives and
that of so many other people in the urbanized world.
Danckaert’s work thus becomes a landmark of intercultural understanding,
something that manages not to be trapped in the easy imageries of the
exotic-typical, but brings us back to where things begin and end: in
real human life. In an age of globalization, such levels of
understanding are real, valuable forms of knowledge.
Jan Blommaert
