Saddie Choua’s works usually depart from documentary material of a visual or textual nature. She layers fiction, literature, music, and theater into spatial situations that tell stories but also reveal the tricky mechanisms at play in film and entertainment, as well as in everyday life and conversations. Integrating elements of her own life such as her immigrant background, Choua addresses racism, discrimination against women, and colonialism. In the six-channel video installation „Am I The Only One Who Is Like Me?“, Choua weaves new connections between images and sound. Overlaying rap songs to a performance of child star Shirley Temple, reading from Toni Morrison’s novel The Bluest Eye, or quoting casual racist comments from her own environment, Choua leads the viewer into an intricate audiovisual collage. This mélange exposes racist practices common to Hollywood, birth control as a means to exterminate black populations, racially targeted police brutality and murder, tolerated racist cultural symbols, all the while juxtaposing them to portraits of strong non-white women, such as the feminist writer Nawal El Saadawi, singer Beyoncé, painter Frida Kahlo, author bell hooks, or rapper Missy Elliott. The work thus becomes not only an appeal to decolonize feminism, but also one that points out stereotypical images collectively internalized that help maintain dominant and discriminatory ideas on gender and ethnicity. In doing so, Choua constructs a jarring portrait of how exclusion, disempowerment, and imposed self-consciousness work in very casual, quotidian ways – much in the same way as on a large and structural scale.
More information: Kunsthalle Wien
