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At Espace culturel Louis Vuitton, it started off like this:
… and ended up like this:
Transfigurations: Indonesian Mythologies at Espace culturel Louis Vuitton, Paris, curated by Hervé Mikaeloff. 24 Jun – 23 Oct 2011. Made with the generous support of Louis Vuitton Malletier.

The aftertaste was something of fiction and somewhat real.

Documentation is crucial to history. It asserts the realness of what happened in the past, and thus builds some kind of faith. A documentary often invests in this kind faith and play with it. The nation-states often need this kind of faith from its citizens, thus they often rely on documentary and documentation.

Fallen is a part of my body of works on border and chance. It is neither documentation nor a documentary, although it was based on a somewhat real event. Following the path of skepticism that the real event was based on, the documentation is dramatized: it is heavily edited, and lightly presented with enchanting music.

Projected on a white wall, the images fade in and out quietly. The atmosphere resembles some kind of a transit place; a clean and white purgatory with no context. The only colours we see are of the passports on the fallen pedestals.

We see the fall, and then we see the pedestals rise again, before they fall again. We see people tracing some kind of an instruction on the wall, we see people writing their names on the passport, and we see people smiling to each other. But do they exist in the same reality? Even when they existed in the same space, they might have come and gone at different times.

Depending on when we enter the projection room and how long we stay, the story might unveil differently, as the video loops in eternity. Did the pedestals fall first and were erected again?

Which happened first, the fall or the rise? The music stops abruptly but slowly and it disappears between the sound of the pedestals falling. Is it really the sound of pedestals falling?

The impossibility of tracing the sequence of events is the impossibility of tracing what is real. Has it fallen, or will it fall?

Time, they say, is a big ball of yarn. History, they say, repeats itself. Like an image of an alluring Hades, Fallen keeps repeating itself in infinity. The sequence of images and sounds gradually builds into becoming a solid conceptual object that leaves the space where it originates, and occupies another space that is more than four-dimensional.

Video stills courtesy of the artist.