A trip to an uncertain state, 2008
Sound installation, video, photography
The multilayered installation A trip to an uncertain state consists of a sound installation of spoken word text placed in a monochrome room, a one-channel video installation, and a set of 37 photographs. The installation was presented at KHM Gallery, Malmö, in May 2008.
The work’s point of departure is the experience of contemporary travel to Israel and Palestine. Having travelled to this area herself, Hasager investigates the specificity of a viewpoint that self-consciously understands itself as outsider to the political situation encountered on this travel, but that is nevertheless deeply affected, emotionally and politically, by its conditions. The travelled region, with its dense history and politics, is represented as a personal, emotional landscape that needs to be navigated with the utmost care and attention, to be made sense of, and to be seen.
The metaphorical and the documentary, the factual and the fictitious, experience and knowledge, intertwine in the work, weaving a complex narration that allows for more than one perspective to prevail. Rather than taking sides, Hasager’s quest is to recognise and understand the different political positions, as well as to recognise the limits of such understanding when it is that of an outsider. Like the characters represented in the work, viewers are invited to navigate this landscape and to find a way to make sense of a situation that is familiar through news reports but nevertheless immeasurably distant in its meaning and implications, personally, politically, and historically.