Refugee talks

Andrea Lange is a Norwegian artist whose work reflects the increasing dynamism of
Scandinavian multimedia art. Lange’s media include video, sculpture and film, and her work is imbued with both a playful sense of popular culture as well as a focus on the contemporary political challenges confronting Europe. ‘Refugee Talks’ was featured in the 1999 Melbourne International Biennial, Signs of Life, and was one of the most discussed and controversial works in the exhibition.

To make ‘Refugee Talks’, Andrea Lange took her video camera to a reception centre for refugees in Norway. Awaiting confirmation or denial of their residency applications, the refugees ‘speak’ this state of ‘becoming’ through the medium of music. They sing songs that evoke origin and a sense of place, songs and lamentations in their own languages. Sometimes, however, they sing to us in accents and expressions that are more familiar to us in the West: two young girls dance to the Spice Girls and declare that, If you wanna be my lover, you gotta get with my friends.

Exhibited at life-size scale, ‘Refugee Talks’ asks us to listen directly to these contemporary ‘psalms’, to look into the eyes of the singers and to sense the remembered worlds they are carrying with them - even as the bureaucratic politics of their lives in the camps is presently regulating, like an old metronome, all the vibrancy they have to offer.