Jailhouse Rock

Videoinstallation in two parts, 2009

Part 1:

There is a three minutes long video loop with a talking parrot on a TV-screen. The following text is displayed on a plate below the screen:

When I was in kindergarten, one of my classmates complained about the high tax burden. He did not know what it meant but he still he complained. He did not know that tax money funded his day at preschool, his lunch and the dreaded visit of the dentist. Now; you can think what you like about taxes, but it was just that he did not think. He simply repeated. It is not that I think that my classmate was stupid, you can not ask so much of a six year old. I have done the same many times since then. I hear something, not thinking about it, and make it my opinion. I am a parrot. It is really dangerous the times when I can not distinguish between facts and opinions.

According to gender research, which has reviewed applications for research funding, assessors evaluate the characteristics differently depending on the sex of the applicant. If a male researcher moves between the different fields he is interdisciplinary and wide. If a woman does the same thing she is undecided. The same applies to the opposite: a female researcher who is within a really narrow area is viewed as narrow. A male researcher is avantgarde. If female researchers have childrenit is a problem. For male researchers parenting is considered a positive thing: he has more experience of life than one who is childless. And so on.

These scientific objective assessors are also parrots.

For a month´s time I have picked out sentences that describe men and women from the major Swedish newspapers. I have taught a parrot to say a representative sample of these sentences. There are three times as many descriptive sentences of men, and in several cases, the same adjectives:

He is angry (2 times). He is careful (2 times). He is young (2 times).

The only sentence I found several times if a woman is:

She is dark.

And then I found: She is easy to use. She is fragile.

It is like a joke.

Part 2:

A place built man sized brdcage furnished with tables and chairs is situated in a small room.

A half empty coffee cup is left as a of someone who used to sit in the cage. On the door there is a padlock that can be unlocked from the outside as well as from the inside. The lock still has it´s factory code: 0000.

The cage is a place for resting. It serves as a pause but also symbolizes the structures that allow our thinking but at the same time are limiting it. It is about the yearning for true freedom.

The work as a whole deals with the ambition to avoid the useless units we casually repeat and through the repetition create a performativ effect and therefore shape our lives and our view of ourselves and each other.

This project has been financed by EE-medel, a part of R & D in the arts