PLAKT:
Tine Guns
Tine Guns uses mediums such as photography, film, and photobooks to explore perception, memory, and the fragmented notion of time in the human experience. With a background in graphic design, her work displays a strong visual sensibility that brings attention to the construction of images and the spaces between them. She challenges the linearity of cinematic structure, weaving fragmentary visual narratives and perceptual experiments that evoke feelings more than telling conventional stories. Her practice reflects a nuanced sense of being “in between,” exploring personal and collective memory through successive layers of cinematic montage.
Guns’s photographic works often feel like stills from invisible films, suspended in a moment just before or after something happens. They linger in uncertainty, exploring how the act of looking shapes meaning. Her use of photobooks adds a tactile, time-based element to the photographic image—pages turn like shots in a film, sequencing memory, gesture, and atmosphere. Whether in still or moving form, her images resist closure; they suggest, rather than explain, leaving space for the viewer to inhabit.
Guns’ films To Each His Own Mask delves into themes of visibility, protest, and the tension between individual and collective identities. Composed of found and self-recorded footage, the film explores the use of masks in public uprisings — to broader questions of identity, safety, and transformation. The mask becomes both a shield and a symbol, allowing for a form of resistance while obscuring individual identity. Guns juxtaposes these images with intimate, poetic scenes that shift between the personal and the political, offering a meditation on the power of collective action and the ambiguity of appearances.
For her contribution to the PLAKT series, a still from this film was selected: a close-up of a child’s face wearing a balaclava. The image crystallizes a moment of ambiguity and resistance. The child looks straight into the lens with a gaze that is both vulnerable and resolute.
Placed in public space, this image acquires a new urgency and takes on a distinct political charge. The image of a masked child disrupts the visual language of advertising that typically populates public space. It evokes protest not through spectacle or slogans, but through quiet confrontation. The balaclava, often associated with resistance and anonymity, becomes ambiguous when worn by a child: it signals defiance, vulnerability, and the inheritance of struggle. In this context, the poster doesn’t claim space—it questions who is allowed to be seen, to hide, or to speak. By displacing this moment from film to urban wall, the work re-frames protest as something intimate and unfinished, unfolding in silence as much as in noise.
PLAKT invites artists to create works printed as blueback, which are pasted across the city. This is done by professionals who typically distribute event advertisements, giving them control over when and where the artworks appear. Embracing spontaneity and unpredictability, the posters pop up in unexpected spots, disappearing just as quickly—reflecting the uncontrollable, fleeting nature of city life. PLAKT is about creating unexpected encounters—brief moments of joy, curiosity, or reflection. Whether it’s a quick pause during a busy day or a smile on a familiar street corner, these artworks aim to connect art with the everyday, reminding us to live in the moment and embrace the unexpected nature of life.
We are spreading over 300 copies of each artwork across the public spaces of Brussels and Flanders. Exactly when and where? We don’t know—that’s part of the beauty.