Fiona Tan
«Tuareg»

The video shows slowly-paced scenes of Tuareg children, members of the Berber people, in the western regions of the Central Sahara and Sahel Zone. In the images, the larger children stand in the background, pushing and shoving, while the smaller children stand arranged in the foreground, well-behaved and attentive, almost like puppets. The original black-and-white photography is tinted with blue and brown tones, and the recorded acoustics added posthumously—desert winds, distant tones—give the film a peculiar relevance to the present. When for a few seconds the film stops, everything freezes and becomes lifeless. The same video runs in two rooms. But in the adjoining room the video runs in the reverse. The viewer first becomes aware of the illusion at work after changing rooms, and after getting the impression of looking straight through the wall, aware now of an estranging moment of distance from the «other». The artist is «interested in the Western viewer’s relationship to those being observed.» She sees this as being the crucial aspect of her work, not the ethnological input in the background. The unusually shy Tuareg children were not filmed by the artist herself. Fiona Tan was inspired to create this work after finding film footage from 1930 in an archive.