Screened from August 18 to September 18, 2025
Auto-Sculpture II, 2'58'', silent
Presentation
Big Bangers is a long-term project combining film, photography, and sculpture. It draws on an amateur practice derived from auto-cross racing: Big Bangers, a popular car demolition activity found in Northern France, Belgium, and the United Kingdom. The beauty of the gesture — and the philosophy of the community — lies in the deliberate destruction of everyday vehicles through violent collisions that crush engines and car bodies. This aesthetic of destruction gives rise to what participants call, in their own words, “auto-sculptures”: wrecks transformed into unintentional artworks.
The Big Bangers project unfolds along three main lines of research.
The first centers on the transfiguration of landscape through an amateur practice of destruction, a theme that lies at the very heart of the project. The second axis, the inertia of chaos, explores the limits of sculptural gesture. Inspired by the performative acts carried out by passionate participants on the fringes of the practice, this research reflects on the ambiguity of a destructive act — one that is deeply violent yet entirely devoid of political, social, or moral intent.
The third axis focuses on the archive/document, playing with the ambiguity of visual registers. While participants may call the wrecks “auto-sculptures,” they often preserve only photographic or video traces. Archives, fanzines, and amateur footage become both subjects and media — the foundation for a broader reflection on the act of archiving itself.
At its core, Big Bangers seeks to uncover, within the representation of a destructive practice, a meditation on obsolescence and dematerialization. Through an anthropological lens, it confronts us with a brutal, chaotic subculture where the ruined car becomes a kind of trophy. By deliberately extracting sculptural forms from this practice, the project challenges dominant ideas of progress and echoes a society producing its own ruins. In the exhibition space, these fragments are recomposed into immersive environments, inviting viewers to experience a world dislocated and reassembled.
As a musician shaped by the live energy of the post-hardcore scene, I find strong parallels between these communities. The immersive — and sometimes aggressive — exhibition space draws on the sensory intensity of destruction as witnessed behind the scenes at demolition circuits. The installation thus becomes a fractured, multi-layered reading: an open hypothesis that brings together photographs, films, archives, and sculptures within a single, shared environment.
Biography
David de Beyter is a French visual artist working mainly with photography, video, and sculpture. His work explores landscape practices through a conceptual and anthropological lens, often focusing on fringe communities and notions of obsolescence within immersive installations.
His projects have been exhibited at FOAM (Amsterdam, Netherland), the Musée de l’Elysée (Lausanne, Switzerland), Fotomuseum Winterthur (Switzerland), Frankfurter Kunstverein (Germany), and the Institut Français in Madrid (Spain). Represented by Galerie Bacqueville, he has shown at Paris Photo, Photo London, Unseen Amsterdam, Art Paris, Photofairs Shanghai, and Art Rotterdam.
He won the FOAM Talent Prize (2018), was a resident at Casa de Velázquez, and was nominated for the Discovery Prize at Les Rencontres d’Arles (2019). His books Damage Inc (2018) and Build and Destroy (2022) were published by RVB Books. His upcoming book The Skeptics will be released in September 2025.