NEO•GRIOT

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Jeannette Ehlers, in this clip titled Double Me. Photos courtesy Jeannette Ehlers

 

By Laura Dowrich-Phillips

laura@ttol.co.tt

At the age of 19, Jeannette Ehlers came to Trinidad and Tobago with her mother in search of her Trinidadian relatives. Born in Denmark to a Danish mother and Trinidadian father, who later divorced, she grew up never knowing her West Indian roots.

“I had not been in contact with my Trinidadian father for many years at that point in time. My Danish mother wanted me to see Trinidad, so she helped me search for my roots,” said Ehlers, during a visit to T&T over the Carnival season.

The only item Ehlers and her mother had connecting them to their relatives was a postcard with an office address sent by her father’s cousin years ago.

“We were anxious to see if we could still find her there and luckily, she was to be found at her office. She was very surprised to see us as she hadn’t seen my father, her cousin, in 35 years. She opened her arms to us and introduced me to almost every member of this huge family that I suddenly had.

“It was amazing and I was very touched by the warmth and hospitality,” Ehlers said.

Six months after that meeting in 1992, Ehlers returned to T&T and stayed for approximately four months. She immersed herself in the culture, relishing in that part of her life she had been missing.

Jeannette’s football video where the players have been erased leaving only their shadows is part of a six-part Ghost Rider series which is expected to be exhibited all over Germany during the World Cup in June.

 

She has since returned five times, attending family reunions, meeting her cousins, aunts and uncles.

“To find your roots, you understand why you are thinking the way you are; why you feel a certain way. Feelings you couldn’t define before are now in place. It was a very big experience, it meant a lot to me, “ she said in her thick Danish accent.

To further understand her multi-cultural background, Ehlers, 32, a student at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen, is working on a video project to showcase the different sides of her background.

The video, which she will show as part of her final exhibition at the academy, will focus on a Trinidadian woman and a Danish man.

“The Dane is from a part of Denmark where they speak a heavy dialect. It’s my mother’s language, but it is difficult for me to understand,” she explained.

“My father’s lingo is also difficult for me to understand. In the project, I sample the two dialects as I am not familiar with them. In the video, I ask them about their personalities, how they live, what they like to do, how they met their spouses. It’s about meeting cultures and mixing,” she said.

Ehlers specialises in photo and video art because, she said, they are the best media to express what she wants. With video, she manipulates the pictures and changes the focus from what it originally was.

“Digitisation makes it possible to experiment with new methods of understanding. In the tradition of the avant garde, my intention as a video artist is, in a simple way, to try to change the established order and thereby contribute to a new way of seeing and perceiving,” Ehlers said.

Her first manipulated piece was a video of a football match where she erased all the players so it looked liked the ball was being moved around by shadows.

“It was very funny. I hope it made people realise that things could be different. It makes you think of anonymity, identity and so on.”

The football video is one in a six-part series titled Ghost Rider. In a catalogue published for The Shadow exhibition, which celebrated the 250th birthday of the Danish writer Hans Christian Andersen, a Danish art critic discussed Ehlers’ series.

“Her starting point is in so-called ‘found footage,’ that is to say existing video imagery, which she takes into her digital laboratory where she painstakingly transforms it. Like a surgeon, she performs simple, but significant, operations on the appropriated material, from which she, with yet another term borrowed from surgery, ‘removes’ parts of the pictures.

“In this way, Ehlers shifts the focus of the pictures away from their original context. These operations take a very long time, requiring her to work frame by frame on video sequences containing 25 frames per second,” the critic wrote.

She compared Ehlers’ work to that of Austrian artist Martin Arnold “who manipulated old Hollywood films to the point where they became unrecognisable by means of computer techniques.”

Ehlers used the same technique in Double Me, another exhibition where she used old super eight millimetre film from her childhood in the 70s.

“I replaced the adult in the footage with me as an adult so the video is with me for instance having a race with me as a child and other situations in film and in photos.

“The piece calls attention to topics as identity, memory and the dream of immortality and it also deals with compound and displaced time — past, present and future — in a complex self-portrait,” she explained.

Ehlers who is the mother of a nine-month-old baby boy, Vincent, whom she also brought to T&T, does many exhibitions around Europe.

The football video, she said, would be exhibited all over Germany during the World Cup in June.