Tell Me
Video installation, 1997 / 12 min / Floating screen 300 x 225 cm / Space filled with clothes’ trimmings / P.S.1 Open October 97, Queens (NY), USA.
I shot Tell Me with students from Hawaii University. I asked for flyers to be stuck up all over the campus to find students who would agree to talk about sex. When I got there, the flyers announced questions about love… result of a decision taken by the university board! The students were largely steeped in American and Asian culture, two identities where sex is rarely talked about in a direct way, and if it is, it is done scientifically. In the end, Tell Me became the result of the various detours made, mixed in with various slips. The installation was first shown at the Honolulu Triennial, with a floor covered with clothes found through advertisements; it was then shown for the re-opening of P.S.1 in New York with a floor covered with a ton of clothes’ trimmings and scraps taken from sweatshops around the exhibition venue. What I call the “shadow of bodies”. These scraps, from cuts made over nine days by a dozen women, tallied with the time it took to shoot the work.