Citizen

'Citizen' explores the phenomenon of, and our consciousness about refugees, based on the current global crisis and how a renewed collective alienation is emerging. 'Citizen' encourages the viewer to walk in the footsteps of a multitude of anonymous people on the move, displaced, without a country and without a home. 'Citizen' enables an imaginative journey between present and past, between here – geographical, social and cultural locations of the spectator – and there – the site of the original trauma. 'Citizen' seeks to capture the actuality of the lived experience, and acts on several levels as it engages with the trauma, hurt and loss that constitutes the dialogue of this work.


'Citizen' 2016 (installation 1) is a grid of Birch twigs and paper silhouettes made across one or more walls. Citizen has a minimum measurement of 600 x 200 cm.

'Witness' 2016 (installation 2)
A line of paper silhouettes is pinned in a straight line on a wall, echoed in two vertical mirrors making the ‘queue’ look infinite. Dimensions variable.

The materials in these installations are chosen for their temporal quality. Each silhouette is unique, is 2.5 cm and is made from an image of a refugee taken from the internet representing a real person. Viewed as a miniature silhouette, a refugee looks just like any person; it could be you or me. The multiplicity of scale intensifies the vulnerability of each individual subject. This ambiguity is deliberate as all boundaries are blurred when the individual is placed within a grid, while at the same time collective systems like nationality, religion, culture and family disappear.

'Blink' (2016) is a video about what it means not to see. In non-stop motion, families of refugees walk 360 degrees around the clock across time and culture. These images have been researched and taken from the Internet before being processed into silhouettes. Interspersed throughout are images of the artist and her family – blink an eye and you’ll miss an image, blink in astonishment at the atrocities that unfold. Blink conveys how fast and frenzied historical trauma is communicated to us through the media and how hard it is for us to process such suffering, the impact of the violation of human dignity and its consequences as experienced on a massive scale in the world today, generating a kind of moral indifference. HD, looped, duration (full 360 degrees) 12.39 minutes, projected scale 118.5 x 67 cm.

'Fugue' (2016) is shot with a handheld camera by an anonymous person running through a forest. We do not know if (s)he is hunter or predator. The video is framed in a circular form that encourages two readings - are we looking at the forest with a torch, or through the barrel of a gun? We are unsettled by the ambiguity that is deliberately suggested. HD, looped, duration 4.30 minutes, projected scale 100 cm diameter.

'Blink' + 'Fugue' are shown together in one space to the same soundtrack which is the sound of a heartbeat interspersed with the song of a blackbird.