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VIETNAM HELLO BYE BYE OK VIDEO INSTALLATION 1995

The background to this installation was a journey through the whole of Vietnam in 1994. Vietnam at that time was a very closed country. You for example had get permission to travel to the different district in the country. People and specially children were not used to cameras. We brought a camera and filmed at different places. One of the things that happened when we filmed children, were that they curiously looked right into the camera for a long time trying to figure out what the camera was and how it worked. It was a strange new experience that they were not quite able to understand. We used these sequences and combined them with with material filmed when we were followed by a big group of children repeatedly, unisonly and somewhat threatingly chanting a sentence in English. The installation revolves around questions about depiction, colonialism and contacts between different cultures.

Installation ten TV monitors and sound. Two sequences that alternate every two minutes show Vietnamese children looking directly into the camera. In one sequence the children are shown individually, one after another, on separate monitors. At the same time one hears “Hello”. In the other sequence the monitors show different children simultaneously and you hear the rhyme “Hello, Bye Bye OK” repeated continuously by a group of children. In the first sequence the children are portrayed as individuals with whom it might be possible to make contact, in the second they become a mass and a threat. The sequences consist of the same images.

Galleri Index, 1995, Stockholm, Sweden, Galleri Otso, Helsingfors, Finland, Fields, Zurich, A night at the show, videoinstallation (with Cecilia Parsberg)

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