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041, 043
071
VPD
P.006
Vincent Pécoil, Dijon.
JENS HAANING
According to Edward W. Said, "as the twentieth century moves to a close, there has
been a gathering awareness nearly everywhere of the lines between cultures, the
divisions and differences that not only allow us to discriminate one culture from
another, but also enables us to see the extent to which cultures are humanely made
structures of both authority and participation, benevolent in what they include,
incorporate and validate, less benevolent in what they exclude and demote." 1
Borders are a recurring issue in Jens Haaning’s art, and it is precisely on a border,
the legislative border between what can be represented and what cannot, that he
usually chooses to work. His series of photographs of first generation immigrants
living in Copenhagen (Antonio, Deniz, etc., 2000), for example, or of mentally ill
people, which take on the look of trendy fashion pictures (the kind that affects a
certain realism), or his calendar of pictures representing refugees (The Refugee
Calendar, 2002), are instances of an eruption, in the field of familiar images, of the
massive cultural repressed which generally excludes these people from the field of
representation.
"The main battle in imperialism is over land, of course; but when it came to who
owned the land, who had the right to settle and work on it. . . –these issues were
reflected, contested, and even for a time decided in narrative. As one critic has
suggested, nations are narrations. The power to narrate, or to block one narrative
from forming and emerging is very important to culture and imperialism, and
constitutes one of the connections between them." 2 This of course also applies to
visual representations. Borders between countries and cultures overlap or reproduce
the legislative borders within representation dividing what can and what cannot be
represented… In 1961, it was still possible for Jean-Paul Sartre to declare, in his
attack written as a preface to Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, that "not
so long ago, the earth numbered two billions inhabitants, i.e. five hundred million
men and one billion five hundred million natives. The former owned the Word, the
latter borrowed it." 3 After decolonization and a few billions extra human beings, one
doesn’t speak about natives anymore, but in many regards "the others" are still
borrowing the Word. The very legitimacy of the powers that be is premised on their
capacity to inscribe themselves within the dominant system of representation they
organize, and consequently on excluding from representation the others, such as