Twenty-six people hear a very odd question. Their reactions are recorded in nine photographs, one second apart.

Showing soon at Full Circle in Brussels.

Video and still re-enactment of 27 interactions, gestures, and postures we see in train stations and airports. Examples include "two people reuniting, happy to see each other", "a person, looking for another person", "two people parting, both angry", and "antidote to manspreading". The scenes were interpreted by Luigi Bisogno, Irene Occhiato, Alexandra Pholien, Paola di Bella, and Florian Vuille of performance company Brut Movement.

It featured large prints and three video screens in the l'Espace «QARTIER» gallery in Bourse metro station, Brussels from November 2023 to February 2024.

This was a collaboration with Florence Collard.

Scenography by Marie Douel, installation by Lolá Mancini.

People tell a story, are filmed listening to it played backwards, and then the film is reversed. They react to their just-told stories, but their own words are suddenly unfamiliar.

What happens when cause follows effect?

22 videos from one to nine minutes on five 32 inch screens.

Shown at Full Circle in Brussels, 18 March 2023.

Dancers Josh Attwood, Macarena Bielski Lopez, Patric Eduardo Da Cunha, Savannah Fuentes, Katie Crain, Namyoon Kim, Maureen Antonia Urrego, Jieying Nah, Wladimir Pino Olivares, Eleni Papaioannou, Alexandra Pholien, Alexandra Pons, Kim Ramiandry, Marie Sheehy, Ekaterina Varfolomeeva, Hayley Walker, and Daisy Winstanley

This project looks at the meaning of the face in performance, questioning how it is read in a world of scrutiny. Dancers, given the instructions to make their passport face, eye the camera, turn, return, restore the glance, and turn again. They begin with a neutral expression, and subtle emotions show. But can we claim to know anything about them just from their faces?

The work, based video and still images, asks what happens when we try to scrutinise the inscrutable. Stephen’s research looks at the perils of automated emotion recognition and shortcuts to understanding, red-flagging a new wave of physiognomy. 

Winner of the Sproxton Award for Photography.

Thanks to dancers Alexandra Pholien, Josh Attwood, and Hayley Walker.

This series looks at assertive reactions to things not being what they should be. Borrowing from Magritte, an ambiguous white sphere appears in rooms, public spaces, and nature. In Magritte’s paintings, people are unaware of the object. A 1967 television series, ‘The Prisoner’ featured another sphere, nicknamed “Rover”, where it was used to enforce subservience. 

Thanks to dancer Alexandra Pholien.

Nietzsche had mixed feelings about theatricality; he once described acting as “pantomimic hocus-pocus”. Yet he also encouraged a theatrical way of viewing. Erving Goffman, in contrast, said that all human interactions are performances.

This series records contact improvisation by two dancers, and looks at the connotations of body language and emotionally-charged postures. What do we see, interaction, performance, magic?

Thirty-two 24 x 24cm prints.

Thanks to dancers Alexandra Pholien and Leanne Vincent.

This series looks at obstacles to reading faces, playing with Shannon and Weaver’s model of communication (sender, transmitter, medium, interpretation, and receiver).

People are asked to make their neutral, passport face behind a sheet of fabric (the medium). They are lit from above in a typical portrait light, then from below in a classic scary torch-below-the-face light. The facial expression behind the fabric doesn’t change.

Do these people still look neutral? Viewed close, some of the images are almost incomprehensible; does that mean that the closer we look, the less we see?

Thanks to Alexandra Pholien.

Garry Winogrand said “I photograph to find out what something will look like photographed”. Repetition & Difference looks at what happens to an image through repeated recreation.

Dancer Alexandra Pholien performs in projections of Florence Collard’s Osmose paintings, themselves based on photographs of Alexandra dancing.

This series inverts classic approaches to portraiture, omitting the face and removing light. A traditional portrait might remind us of what we already believe about a person (think of a portrait of Queen Elizabeth and how it might be influenced by confirmation bias) or it can remind us of how little we actually know about a stranger (think of Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring). If, instead, our view of a person is limited to certain aspects of body language, do we learn any less compared to regarding their face?