Bonjour Ostende
1st Price "The City Tells"  / WPP18 Zwolle - NL

The photographs of the Bonjour Ostende collection were taken during the period 2012-13 when he salted in Belgium, and in part constitute a way of becoming familiar with his natural and social reality. At the same time, through the art of photography which he practices, they constitute a continuous thread of his earlier life.
Shkreli studies the pulse of the Belgian seaside town with emphasis on the beach’s summer conditions, there where people are usually revitalised and reveal themselves, where tourism mingles with slothful everydayness. His compositions,  either snapshots or seemingly uninhabited scenes, are forceful, with a careful manipulation of form beneficial to the look’s penetration. What does one discover through these? A public space in which things are presented at random, where more or less distinct counterpoints evolve: social, religious, racial, where people can remain at a safe distance, even when they are crammed together, where rational order and precise organisation ensure the smooth flow of facts and information, setting up a public space, not always in cohesion, in which visual fallacy sometimes impresses more than the pulsing life. In a photograph, perhaps unusually opportune, two Muslim women are watching the activity on the beach from the distance imposed by bareness because of their dress code. The Bars behind which their bodies are outlined reflect confinement, signifying limits invisible but existent.

Good morning Ostend.                                            prints