This work is part of a range of new paintings that are made with an industrial powder coating technique, in which the lacquer is burnt directly into the aluminium. For these works, Bijl uses images from daily news reports of important events or the deaths of celebrities and modifies them to become almost unrecognizable. After Dark, for example, is a blurred version of one of the last photos of Prince, taken in his own club ‘After Dark’. Others, such as Brussel and Chicago, are based on news images of terrorist attacks and shootings. This ongoing series of blurry images converted from existing media photos represents Bijl’s perspective on the slowly dissolving boundaries between fact and fiction. As Bijl further explains: ‘The abstract and haziness symbolize looking away, hypocrisy and refusing to see things clearly: a new political movement’. Within the exhibition, this is further expressed through the Fake Manifest, that addresses the volatile character of online statements, and the site specific installation The Diffusion Politics, that literally puts its surroundings in a new light. The works combined are an active attempt to broach automated opinions, photos and news
feeds through social media and criticize their negative influence and dangerous effects on
our perception, on reality and on group dynamics.