Project Year: 1995
Location: Copenhagen, DK
For Portraits of Exile, nine large light boxes (mounted with transparency images) were submerged underwater in Copenhagen’s Borsgraven canal just in front of the Danish parliament building. The project presented two human rights stories and challenges: the heroic Danish rescue of their Jewish community on fishing boats to Sweden in 1943, and the more ambiguous Danish response today to present-day refugees. As the shared thread between these two stories of rescue is water, I therefore created an underwater installation to embody these issues. The light boxes were submerged underwater for six weeks.
