Rendezvous

Overview

As an Artist-in-residence with Sharjah Biennial 7, Nikolaj Larsen spent nearly a year living in downtown Sharjah, one of the major areas where local labourers come to socialise after work. Walking around at night, he noticed that nearly everyone he encountered was young, male and South Asian. Reflecting on the distance between these workers and their families, Larsen began to imagine towns in India and Pakistan populated solely by women, children and the elderly. He pictured this space as being full of love, devotion, hope, loss and longing.

In what he describes as the ‘poetic documentary’ Rendezvous, Larsen attempts to capture the accumulated emotion contained within this abstract space. In 2008, he spent a month travelling throughout the UAE and Kerala, India, meeting and filming workers and their families. Before the start of filming, he would ask the workers to think of their families and vice versa.

The result was two sets of footage that are screened on opposite ends of a room, placing the audience physically in the middle of this charged emotional context. Accompanied by a soundscape created in collaboration with Mikkel H Eriksen, the poignant poetic nature of Rendezvous suspends the viewer metaphorically and physically between the gazes of those on screen and the feelings of hope and longing between worker and family.

Larsen’s installation reunites these men with their families while simultaneously emphasising and making palpable the distance between them. It communicates the complexity of this particular and unique economic condition and, in its juxtaposition of lush sub-continental tropics and dry desert, articulates the cultural distances these men must negotiate.


This project was part of Sharjah Biennial 9