X-hale
(2023)

Excerpt, X-hale. Film, B/W, sound, 2 min 23 sec.

Video shows an X-ray image of an immigrant body during a TB test that seems to be inhabited by moving organisms, while a voiceover intermittently speaks in Indonesian, Korean and fragments of a poem in several languages flicker across the screen. The filmic collage combines the artist’s personal experience as she lived through her body, which became the object of medical examination, with the microscopic images collected at the museum. It considers the body as a geopolitical locus. As in territories operations of surveillance are conducted here to distinguish registered, allowed, legalized bodies, from those that are considered as a danger, or as stowaways, illegal entities—bodies crossing borders without permission.

X-hale has been commissioned by Trouble Dans les Collections and presented at Branching Streams. Sketches of Kinship. Research exhibition at Musée Théodore Monod d’art africain, Biennale de Dakar, Darkar.

Image credit: Medical X-ray print of Aram Lee, Microscope image was developed at the microbes laboratory of Amsterdam UMC.