Karel Doing

Connections

Installation
Triple screen
SD video
7 minutes
2004

Lulu Ratna & Karel Doing

Exhibition:
Witte de With Centre for Contemporary Art(Rotterdam)
Montevideo (Amsterdam) - single screen version

Broadcast:
HollandDoc (Netherlands - cable TV)





 

Karel Doing & Lulu Ratna - Connections

The Netherlands and Indonesia are inextricably connected because of their history. Many Dutch people and Indonesians still have personal memories of the direct links with the colonial society that the Netherlands imposed on Indonesia. The video installation Connections is about the visible and hidden relations between the two countries, the personal and more universal similarities and differences.

Karel Doing (Rotterdam) and Lulu Ratna (Jakarta) collected footage on their regular train journeys. Trains and stations are a sort of democratic gathering of city-dwellers. Here people get together with a shared goal, but individual interests. These are the marketplaces of coming and going, selling the gratification of ones desire to elsewhere, platform for wanted and unwanted meetings, crossroad of crossroads.

The artists also started a list of shared words in both languages (Dutch, Bahassa Indonesia). These words are an example of the painful and at the same time colourful way both cultures influenced each-other.

Tanja Elstgeest