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| Index (Itinerary - Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea , february 2010 , Juche 99) (2011) |
Now what is the message there? The message is that there are known "knowns." There are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say there are things that we now know we don't know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we do not know we don't know. Former Secretary of Defence D.H. Rumsfeld
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Catalogue Text: It wasn´t Rumsfelds enigmatic and by now widely quoted statement that Anu Ramdas had in mind, when she bought a Micro Holga 110 for 15 USD in a bookstore in Tokyo. Rather she was thinking about her impending trip to the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea and acquired the small camera, because she thought it had a disarming quality. It is no secret that the DPRK, also known as North Korea, is one of the most secretive and restricted places on earth when it comes to allowing foreigners to take pictures. Apparently one can browse the internet though and find loads of images shot inside the isolated northern part of the Korean peninsula. But to what extent do these certified pictures cast a light? Photography and the cinema are discoveries that satisfy, once and for all and in its very essence, our obsession with realism, says André Bazin in The Ontology of the Photographic Image from 1959. But what kind of realism can a toy camera produce, of a place that remains obscure to the visiting outsider? And what kind of images do NASA´s satellites, in orbit around the earth, equipped with the most powerful camera lenses produce of that same place, at an altitude of 450 miles? The cheapest piece of plastic versus the most advanced state-of-the-art technology. Still there does seem to be some kind of coherence. It´s as if Ramdas´ images too, were shot from an altitude somewhere above the atmosphere, where the lack of light renders a correct exposure impossible. Instead of casting a light, Ramdas orchestrates a blackout, as an iconoclastic response to the official images of the DPRK, that circulate in the various printed and digital media. Her images manifest a politics of vision, that corresponds with her own state of uncertainty. Ramdas enlarges her rolls of film, as if to reveal some kind of hidden evidence, but the question is if this strategy leads us down a blind alley. While we contemplate the images in search of more information, Rumsfelds´ statement echoes somewhere behind the curtain of the large prints. Christian Danielewitz |
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Accompanying Text: The small van stopped at the first monument. We got off at Mansu Hill. The monument was a statue of the Great Leader overlooking a large square on the west bank of the Taedong River. The noonday grey sky cinema-ized the site, turning the monument into an under-exposed picture. Photographing it with my Micro Holga 110 was like photographing a photograph. The lack of light became a monstrous shutter that projected a detached series of "stills" through my Micro Holga into my eye. When I walked on the square, it was as though I was walking on a huge photograph that was made of concrete and all around the monument existed an enormous movie film that showed nothing but a continous black. R.S. /A.R.
Inkjet print on premium semigloss paper.
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Installation view from AFGANG 2011 at Kunsthal Nikolaj , Copenhagen - DK. |
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| The material I collected during these four days in the DPRK have been presented in a variety of media and approached in distinctive ways. What occured to me during the process of reflecting on this material was, that most of it was affirmative, in the sense that it didn´t differ from the sort of images already circulating in the various printed an digital medias. But there were also images (and sound recordings) that had the potential to represent a different perspective. |
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| © AnuRamdas 2004 -2012 |
Low Light Imaging of the Korean Peninsula at night.