Blinked Myself Awake

In recent years, photographer Bieke Depoorter has sought out amateur stargazers, visited state-of-the-art observatories, and researched the history of astronomy. Never especially interested in the field earlier, she gradually realized that her new obsession was related to childhood memories lost due to trauma. The night sky is, after all, a kind of shared memory: the light from celestial bodies can take hundreds or thousands of light-years to reach our eyes on earth. Some observable stars may have disappeared long ago.

Depoorter felt reluctant to look at stars herself but was drawn to observing others as they observed the universe. In Blinked Myself Awake, she investigates the fragility of memory, photography’s unreliability, the human desire for objectivity, and the elusive nature of ‘truth.’ She connects the dots of a highly personal narrative, interweaving images of stargazers with diaristic texts and fragments from the history of astronomy – a science that was forever changed by the invention of photography.