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In Multiple lies, two video projections and two vertically stacked
monitors simultaneously show images of the threatened traditional Dutchness
of Madurodam’s artificial world. One of the projections shows a foreign
family’s reflection in the water as they cross an artificial dike in
the theme park. Canned sounds can be heard of the Dutch national anthem that
blares from a miniature stadium nearby when visitors insert a coin into the
mechanism to activate it. With 50 cents, a visitor creates a cheap version
of the highly coded semiotics of national identity at ease. The reflection
of the foreign family is projected upside down so that the images are upright,
which renders the scene absurd, with a fish occasionally passing by the walking
family. Within the framework of national representation, the working family
and the somewhat muffled national anthem provide us with an intriguing contrast
reading.
The other projection shows a montage of scenes in which trains, airplanes and
cars move with absolute purposelessness and meaninglessness. The two vertically
stacked monitors show, respectively, a rotating windmill and a freight elevator
moving back and forth along a rail, monotonously and wearily. As a whole, the
sounds and the images produce an inexorable sense of oppression, alienation and
ultimately emptiness, which are inherent in the time marked by the endless process
of reproduction of the real, of simulation of the real.
In Multiple Lies, the issues such as national identity and its semiotics
are contemplated within the territory of a simulated reality, Madurodam, which
the artist considers as a synthetic Holland made for fun and a set of meticulously
constructed lies; and thus the idea that there is anything conceivable as a national
identity is rendered absurd here. In the context of Synthetic Reality,
clearly with the predominant Orientalism in mind, the artist attempted to reverse
the usual route between the West and the rest, mockingly, by presenting to ‘the
rest’ an ‘Occidentalism’ version of the West.
