Johan Grimonprez

Johan Grimonprez (born 1962; Roeselare) is a Belgian multimedia artist, filmmaker, and curator. He is most known for his films Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y (1997) which the Guardian included in its article From Warhol to Steve McQueen: a history of video art in 30 works, Double Take (2009) and Shadow World: Inside the Global Arms Trade (2016), based on the book by Andrew Feinstein. Grimonprez wrote and directed the documentary Soundtrack to a Coup d'Etat about the promise of decolonisation, the hope of the non-aligned movement and the dream of self-determination.

Grimonprez was born in 1962 in Roeselare, Belgium. After studying cultural anthropology, he went on to complete his studies in photography and mixed media at Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Ghent. Grimonprez received an MFA in Video & Mixed Media at the School of Visual Arts in New York. In 1993, Grimonprez was accepted into Whitney Museum Independent Study Program and later attended the Jan van Eyck Academy in Maastricht, Netherlands. In 1993, Grimonprez worked on the series Besmette Stad for the program Ziggurat on Belgian television.

His films are characterised by a criticism of contemporary media manipulation, described as: "an attempt to make sense of the wreckage wrought by history." This films "speak to the need to see history at a distance, but at the same time to speak from inside it". Other themes include the relationship between the individual and the mainstream image, the notion of zapping as "an extreme form of po…