Constructing Destruction

Christoph Draeger opened the series of lunchtime talks today, with a revealing insight into his development as an artist and the nature of his work. His lecture was refreshingly honest, as he explained how his interests have owed much to personal preferences and experiences.

Draeger is a conceptual artist, who works across different media. He has been fascinated with the concept of “disaster” and “catastrophe” since childhood, and these ideas, in their broadest sense, define his work. There is no distinction in his work between the man-made and the natural, and he chooses to leave the “moral categorisation to others, to philosophers, to the press”. His early work, such as the prize-winning Catastrophe #1, focused on the paradox of “constructing destruction”, while also considering the ways in which memory of disaster functions. His ongoing Voyages Apocalyptiques charting sites from Heysel to Hiroshima, presents us with impressionistic images of the locations of famous disasters and how they have been reconstructed.

He also gave us an insight into the practical problems which face an artist: from the harsh necessities of his first studio in Brussels, to the frank admission that his original presentation of Catastrophe #1, glued to the walls of an Antwerp gallery “was unsellable - but an artist has to live”. This talk was an intriguing and a thoroughly entertaining introduction to an important artist and the way he thinks about his work.