Public
2009 · Two lightboxes, 140 photographic slides, two text boards
2009 · Two lightboxes, 140 photographic slides, two text boards
Public brings photographs from a Danish family album into correspondence with events relating to the conflict between Vietnam and the United States. Paired through their dates, the images and texts place private experience alongside political history, considering how each becomes remembered, shared or overlooked.
Two lightboxes each contain seventy photographic slides depicting a Danish family’s life from the late 1950s to the late 1960s. Everyday scenes, holidays, weddings and funerals form a familiar record of personal experience. Alongside them, two text boards describe 140 events relating to the conflict between Vietnam and the United States. Each photograph shares its date with one of these events.
The correspondence establishes a common moment between otherwise separate circumstances. A family occasion and a distant political or military event occupy the same day, bringing different experiences of historical time into proximity. Their relationship emerges through simultaneity, leaving the viewer to negotiate the distance between them.
Neither sequence offers a definitive beginning or end. Both present fragments whose selection and arrangement shape a particular account of the past. The work places the family album alongside the historical chronology, asking what each preserves and what falls outside its frame.
Through this encounter, Public considers two ways of writing history: one private, brought into public view; the other public, yet capable of remaining outside the awareness of everyday life.