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Trigger Heads

Artists giving insights in their work process


Image: Installation view, The Chouas Episode 5 Am I The Only One Who Is Like Me?, Saddie Choua, commissioned by Stichting Kanal, 2018 ©Veerle Vercauteren

Hoda Afshar, Saddie Choua & Liz Orton


04 dec. 2020 • 30 min

Three artists show up in three separate short ‘home videos’ and discuss issues of uncertainty. All three of them are part of Trigger #2: Uncertainty. Here they give new insights in their different photographic and film practices on the occasion of FOMU’s Online Festival ‘Uncertainty’ (3 – 6 December, 2020).

Hoda Afshar’s last project deals with ‘agonistes’, the struggling 'truth tellers' represented by today's whistleblowers who find themselves in vulnerable and uncertain conditions in the context of globalisation. She talks about how she met these different people in an Australian context, and shares with us the choices she makes in the editing process of her series and video. Afshar's artist contribution in Trigger nr.2 is accompanied by an essay by academic whistleblower scholar Wim Vandekerckhove.

Saddie Choua’s video-installations often occupy ‘uncomfortable’ places in which she questions suppressing power relations and unmasks the exoticism of dominant media coverage. She discusses her confrontational multidisciplinary work in the making of her meta-soap series 'The Chouas' and the film on the Moroccan sociologist Fatima Mernissi. Choua's work is discussed in Trigger nr.2 by Petra Van Brabandt, 'Not (Safe) at Home. On Being Present in the Work of Saddie Choua'.

Liz Orton has an interest in feminist strategies that question the ethics, categorisation and gender roles in scientific evidences and archives. In her Trigger Head she shines a light on her work which deals with insurgencies in the archive, and tackles the relation between science and subjectivity. Orton's essay in Trigger nr.2, 'Re-Imagining Archival Evidence', discusses the archival photographic work of Regine Petersen, Sophy Rickett and Kate Morrell.

Hoda Afshar was born in Tehran, Iran, and is now based in Naarm (Melbourne). Her practice explores the nature and possibilities of documentary image-making. Working in photography and moving images, she considers the representation of gender, marginality and displacement. Her work has been widely exhibited both locally and internationally. She’s represented by Milani Gallery in Australia.

Saddie Choua, often starting from ‘documentary’ material, visual or textual, mixes fiction, literature, music, theater into complex spatial events to put racism, discrimination against women and class, and her cats in the spotlight. She creates a new pseudo-realistic imaginary world that is at once highly recognizable and utterly alien. It is her way of undermining the (visual) language of our media and sharpening the critical and political gaze of her audience. The challenge is not to present alternative stories but to create ‚situations' that reveal the power structures behind the images that we internalize and reproduce. Saddie Choua is one of the laureates of the Belgian Art Prize 2020 and is affiliated with the RITCS - School of Arts of the Erasmus University College Brussels.

Liz Orton is a visual artist whose practice is concerned with language, authorship and the body. Her work engages widely with archives, both real and imagined, to explore the tensions between personal and scientific forms of knowledge. Liz is an associate lecturer of photography at the London College of Communication and teaches at Kings College London. She is also an associate artist with Performing Medicine. Liz is the recipient of several major grants and awards, including the MEAD Fellowship, a Wellcome Trust arts award and UCL Grand Challenges grant. She is editor of Becoming Image: Medicine and the Algorithmic Gaze, has exhibited widely and is part of a recently opened show, Seedscapes: Future-Proofing Nature, at Impressions Gallery.

  • Uncertainty
  • Artist contribution