Serious Game
Transgender Portraits
Audio-visual installation by Anja Weber (photography) and Sabine Ercklentz (sound)
“Dear Ladies, Gentlemen... and Others!” This greeting launched the 2nd European Transgender Council in Berlin on May 2nd, 2008, with the theme “Making Human Rights Work.” More than 200 activists representing 83 organizations from 38 countries including Peru, Namibia, USA, Kyrgyzstan, Israel, Japan, and Azerbaijan, as well as 30 European countries, turned the "2nd European Transgender Council" into the first GLOBAL transgender meeting.
One major aspect in the work of transgender activists is visibility. To this end, the artists invited 30 activists to take part in a project creating multimedia portraits.
The artists conducted portrait and interview sessions in a separate photo studio. The photographs are close-up head shots, in which the naked shoulders refer to the body of the portrayed subject without disclosing it. The gaze is directed into the camera. The exhibition prints, larger than life size, will be displayed in close layout all around the gallery walls. The viewer cannot escape the regard of the portrayed.
In interviews, the subjects speak of their personal lives, their self-representation, transgenderism and identity. Fragments of the interviews will be played in the installation through a 4-channel sound-system, with one speaker in every corner of the exhibition space. The authorship of the statements remains deliberately unclear, so that there is no coherency between photograph and sound. The selection of the text fragments results from a random generator choosing among a large pool of sound files. In this fashion, new text clusters evolve again and again, with the single statements, put into new contexts, complementing and interpreting each other.
This combination of image and sound is designed to create a sensual experience with an emphasis on a factual plurality of cultural and gender identity. It tells about transgenderism worldwide, and thus supports the fight for recognition, equality and respect.
Additionally, the set-up intentionally plays with the desire in our society for certainty, for clear classification into the binary categories. By disconnecting the sound from the images, which themselves do not reveal a familiar gendered pattern, this desire is disappointed. Instead, space evolves again and again for new interpretations and gives the viewer the opportunity to learn more about their own ideas, expectations, prejudices, fantasies and visions. This form of presentation prevents the featured subjects from being perceived as representatives of transgender folks per se. In fact, they remain individuals to the highest degree.
Exhibition venues: Malta – Dublin – Vienna – Brussels – Amsterdam – Strasbourg
This Project has been funded by the european commission. this publication reflects the views of the author only and the commission cannot be held responsible for any use which may be made of the information contained therein. German Project No.:2009-1-De2-gru6-01811 1