Vita Nova's exhibition première will take place during Contour Biennale for Moving Images, in Mechelen (Belgium).
"Vincent Meessen’s new film ‘Vita Nova’ takes as its point of departure a cover of the French magazine Paris-Match, from 1955. On this cover, a child soldier is depicted in the act of making a military salute. The artist subsequently embarks on a search for Diouf, the child soldier, weaving an elaborate narrative that brings together phantoms from the colonial past, the writings of Roland Barthes – who wrote about this particular image – and issues that centre on the representation and re-writing of history, its repressed narratives, as well as the spectral nature of photography."
