Emergency Room
Blurry Architecture, 2011. (The building is the Vietnamese parliament, and the work was passed by the censors).
Invited to a show “Emergency Room” at Academy of Fine Arts in Hanoi Vietnam, the conditions were that board of 10 censors from the Vietnamese Communist Party should review the work. In Emergency Rooms premise “every day new work, responding to that days news” this gave very tight limitations for producing the work. As the show reopened every day at 12, it was mandatory to be in front of the censors at 10.
My project was A simple test of the mechanisms of censorship, using the smallest of artistic means. Take an image from the news front page every day, and blur it.
Blurry SUV, 2011. (An article on the rapidly rising amount of cars in Vietnam. Passed by the censors).
Blurry Interview, 2011. (The Minister of Finance Dinh Tien Dung. Rejected by the censors “He can not be out of focus!”). The flowers I added for this documentation photo.
Ingen Frygt and Thierry Geoffroy in front of the Academy of Fine Arts. Their work was not allowed through the gates at all … “It is bad luck to take any kind of funeral flowers into a building, let alone a wreath!”.