Espoo Museum of Modern Art
10.05.2022 - 14.08.2022
Jeannette Ehlers: Black Bullets
Black Bullets is an homage to the Haitian revolution of 1791 when enslaved Africans rebelled against colonial rule. The slavery practiced by the French colonial administration is known as one of the cruellest periods of forced labour. The Haitian revolution, the only successful slave uprising in history, set the scene for Haiti’s independence in 1804. In the video piece, walking human figures and their reflections are depicted against the sky on a mountain-top fort, which was built by the first black Haitian monarch Henri Christophe at the start of the 19th century to defend independent Haiti against the French.
Jeannette Ehlers (b. 1973) is a Danish-Trinidadian artist, who addresses issues of memory, structures of racism, and colonialism by utilising her own body and image manipulation in her works. Her performances, installations, photographs, and video pieces highlight the fact that history is not the past. Colonialism still influences power and resource distribution around the globe as well as in the Nordics.
Jeannette Ehlers
1973 Denmark
Black Bullets
2012
video
5 min
Recorded at The Citadel, Haiti
Sound: Trevor Mathison
Technical assistance: Markus von Platen
Camera: Jette Ellgaard & Jeannette Ehlers