Project with the tag: postcolonialism

Occidental Totems

2011, HD video 16:9, color with sound, 15 minutes, on omnimount stands

Occidental Totems immerses the viewer into the life of a controversial artist: Jacob Epstein (1880-1959), mentor of Henry Moore, who will narrate the story of the statues he carved on the facade of the old Zimbabwe Embassy in London. The primitivist figures depicted a deviant humanity but got mutilated by the colonial power. In a fictional shift, Epstein who praised this exotic “other” seems to enter into a trance himself: the statues talk to him and give an account of a new radical reading of history.

The Scandinavian Housewife’s Disease

2010, Double-sided light box, color picture depicting a human embryo on day 24 by Lennart Nilsson and a Diphyllobothrium broad tapeworm, 47 x 47 cm.

Work in collaboration with Shirin Sabahi.

The work embarks on Diphyllobothrium, a tapeworm that is transmitted from raw fish and causes Diphyllobothriasis infection in human intestines. The common name for this infection is ‘The Scandinavian Housewife’s Disease’ as it was introduced to United States by the flow of Swedish and Norwegian immigrants in the late 1800 and early 1900. The formal resemblance of the tapeworm to the human embryo is emphasized in this work as a mean of embodying ‘the Other within oneself’, a post-colonial term that is used to start the discourse on the Other and its relationship with the body. The images are accordingly chosen from the celebrated ‘Life’ photo series of Lennart Nilsson, a Swedish bio-photographer and the pioneer in the field and an anonymous microscopic image of Diphyllobothrium provided by a medical centre.

Counter

2010, Installation with 35 fluorescent lights, five-digit counter based on the emigration from Sweden in 2009 estimated by Statistiska CentralByrån (Statistics Sweden), programmed by: Michael Möller, 140 x 360 cm

Work in collaboration with Shirin Sabahi

According to Statistics Sweden, in 2009 around 39242 of the registered population moved abroad. The installation is a five-digit counter made of fluorescent light bulbs that accumulates the number of this fraction of population. Every 13 minutes and 26 seconds, one unit is added which indicates one person is lessened from the Swedish population. The enlarged figure of public statistics gets a life of its own and subversively triggers the projected image of Sweden as one of the ultimate destinations of migration. Hinting on the emigrant crowd, the work refers to different temporalities in the present as well as the past; the trauma of losing one fourth of Swedish population in the late 1800 and early 1900, which among other reasons gave birth to the social welfare system, as a solution that the Swedish state could survive the castration of its population.

Projections

2010, Overhead projection installation with two black and white transparent A4 prints depicting illustrations from the Swedish periodical Läsning för folket (Reading for The People) in 1869, dimensions variable.