He is most known for his films Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y (1997), Double Take (2009) and Shadow World: Inside the Global Arms Trade (2016), based on the book by Andrew Feinstein.

In 1993, Grimonprez was accepted into Whitney Museum Independent Study Program and later attended the Jan van Eyck Academy in Maastricht, Netherlands.

Images of Abu Ghraib, 9/11, swine flu, the BP Gulf oil spill and the economic crisis composed our new contemporary sublime."

On February 16, 1961, American jazz musicians Abbey Lincoln and Max Roach crash a UN Security Council meeting to protest against the murder of Patrice Lumumba, the first democratically elected prime-minister of the Congo.

Washington, exploiting the hiatus left by the crumbling colonial empires, cooked up a paranoid cold-war narrative to smother the African dream of sovereignty.

Taking advantage of the situation, Nikita Khrushchev, the shoe-banging leader of the Soviet bloc, invited all the heads of state to discuss demilitarisation and decolonisation at the forthcoming General Assembly in New York.

By October 1960, racist policies of the US and the global interest in the civil rights movement gave ground for Soviet accusations of hypocrisy.

The jazz ambassadors, amongst them Louis Armstrong, Nina Simone, Duke Ellington, Dizzy Gillespie and Melba Liston, faced a painful dilemma: how to represent a country where racial segregation was still enforced by law?

Grimonprez claims that "the contemporary condition of what it is to be human calls into question the relevance of politics and reality, one that has collapsed under the weight of an information overload and mass deception."

"[13] According to Grimonprez, the film not only exposes how corruption drives the global arms trade, while it often sets the stage for war, it hopes to offer also alternatives to the paradigm of greed, celebrated by social darwinism.

[27] "This study in pre-Sept. 11 terrorism"[28] is interspersed with passages from Don DeLillo's novels Mao II and White Noise, "providing a literary and philosophic anchor to the film.

[31] By now, the media is increasingly involved as a key player; "the images of the individual is substituted by a flow of crowds; hijacking is replaced by anonymous suitcase bombs.

[...] Since the eighties, the Reagan Administration started to accommodate the terrorist spectacle to veil its own dirty game in El Salvador, Guatemala and Nicaragua.

The videotape assembles archival footage and oral histories depicting the first encounter between the Irian Jaya people and the scientific crew, including anthropologists, of the Dutch Star Mountains Expedition.

[40] According to Grimonprez: Kobarweng critically considers the myth of objectivity, the pretence of an epistemic and scientific detachment maintained not just by the anthropologist, but throughout the discourse of western science, where the observer finds himself caught in an alienated position of transcendence over his/her subject.

"[41]In 1994, Grimonprez showcased a five-channel installation, It Will Be All Right If You Come Again, Only Next Time Don't Bring Any Gear, Except a Tea Kettle..., which expanded upon the themes of "Kobarweng".

[43] All curated programs, in the form of a video lounge, could be seen as a media-jamming tool at the hand of an extensive collection of clips, that can be envisioned both as the joyful affirmation of a global disengagement of corporations abducting our very essence, patenting and privatizing for profit, alienating our food & bodies by creating a genetically modified variant[44] and the catalyst of debate.

[45] While Walter Benjamin and Sergei Eisenstein defined montage as a revolutionary tool for social analysis, MTV and CNN have surpassed this.

[54] It's a Poor Sort of Memory that Only Works Backwards followed as the first large-scale retroperspective of Grimonprez in his home country, Belgium, in the Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst (SMAK) in Ghent, 2011–2012.

[55] Artforum described the exhibition as "an unfamiliar archive [...] from the perception of fragments to the awareness of a common mentality, from the multiplicity of words to the emergence of a discourse".

A prominent aspect in Grimonprez's work is the sky: "a canvas on which man has always projected his mystical aspirations, his political and economic struggles, and his poetic imaginings.

[56] According to Artforum, the critical dimension of Grimonprez's work follows close behind the "aesthetic of disaster and terror and the virtues of channel surfing in order to plunge the viewer into a state of genuine fascination".

[56] Artforum states that Grimonprez "does not harangue us with denunciations but rather suggests that we reconsider the short circuits of this machine, of which we briefly catch glimpses".