WAP

Ten friends having a meal on ten consecutive days in field in the Dutch countryside. Each day the friends, the tables and the food were shifted closer to the horizon. The photographs of the ten meals were assembled into a single image of a large party. Each friend appears ten times in the photograph, each time in a different outfit. The colours are carefully balanced: the outfits in the background are more brightly coloured than those in the foreground so that they attract equal attention and because of the expanse of blue sky there are no blue outfits.

Hundred different tailors in Beijing made their outfits, not because this made the outfits more affordable but to show that the real world is at least ten times larger that that of the friends in the field. Each of us in the West is probably connected with thousands of Chinese, Thai, Filipino, Indonesian and Indian workers through the products with which we fill our lives.

By being multiplied by ten, each person in the photograph has been rendered an anonymous figure. However, the magazine ‘Ten To One’ introduces us personally to the hundred tailors behind the outfits. A hundred shop fronts, workshops, outfits and tailors were photographed. Even the labels sewn into the outfits and the sales receipts are given a place in the magazine.

It made me wonder how many people are there in my closet …

Artists: Zijlmans & Jongenelis
Website: www.tentoone.nl

“Sometimes fate is like a small sandstorm that keeps changing directions. You change direction but the sandstorm chases you. You turn again, but the storm adjusts. Over and over you play this out, like some ominous dance with death just before dawn. Why? Because this storm isn’t something that blew in from far away, something that has nothing to do with you. This storm is you. Something inside of you. So all you can do is give in to it, step right inside the storm, closing your eyes and plugging up your ears so the sand doesn’t get in, and walk through it, step by step. There’s no sun there, no moon, no direction, no sense of time. Just fine white sand swirling up into the sky like pulverized bones. That’s the kind of sandstorm you need to imagine.

And you really will have to make it through that violent, metaphysical, symbolic storm. No matter how metaphysical or symbolic it might be, make no mistake about it: it will cut through flesh like a thousand razor blades. People will bleed there, and you will bleed too. Hot, red blood. You’ll catch that blood in your hands, your own blood and the blood of others.

And once the storm is over you won’t remember how you made it through, how you managed to survive. You won’t even be sure, in fact, whether the storm is really over. But one thing is certain. When you come out of the storm you won’t be the same person who walked in. That’s what this storm’s all about.”

Words: Haruki Murakami (from Kafka on the Shore)

Art: Ori Gersht

They say that just before you enter heaven you’ll see your life pass before your eyes. Usually imagined as a fast-forward flip book of sentimental still images: birth, parents, school, holiday, first girlfriend, first sex, job, wife, kids, etc. and all the little things in between, summating a totality of meagre existence in a split second flash.
Yeondoo Jung, however, is a man who likes to take a bit of time with things, savour every precious moment, sit back and enjoy the ride.

Documentary Nostalgia is a one-take one-chance-only performance shot in real time. No stops, no pauses. This is Jung’s magnificent autobiography. Birthday party clown tricks, slapstick humour, cartoon exaggeration, and the clumsy ’special effects’ of silent movie cliche; Jung draws from all the low-fi mysteries of childhood delight to reconstruct his own reality.
Not as it was, but as he prefers to remember it, a make-shift mythology in its conception, wide-eyed, innocent, and confounding.
He offers the possibility of not one existence, but many: to be urban and rural, contemporary or ancient, Eastern or Western, to be anywhere or anything at all. Everyone can do this simply by daring to dream.

Artist: Yeondoo Jung