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David Blair (°1975, Wellington) was the third artist which the M HKA invited together with curator Edwin Carels (KASK / HoGent) for an intervention in the Vrielynck Collection. The basis for this third Vrielynck intervention was The Telepathic Motion Picture of The Lost Tribes, an expansive research project that took us back to the reconstruction in Manchuria of a lost film production, the damned epic of The Lost Tribes.

Media artist David Blair juggled with archival footage, animation and live action to create a pseudo-scientific film, in which he explored the boundaries between fact and fiction, truth and invention. This is to illustrate that history is always a construction that is never fixed but always fluid and enforcing new interpretations. The project was also an allusion to the impact nostalgia has on our consumption of information.

For this exhibition, Blair also added a series of paintings, assemblages and short video animations from his archives that have been expanding since 1994 – which further evoked the history of The Lost Tribes. A hypnotic soundtrack which took viewers along in a delirious dream of a derailed archivist, "an infinite universe, a cinematic pantheon full of political ideologies that willingly dissolved in a non-linear time experience." (E. McMehen)