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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.
