Getting Dressed two-channel video installation,

from the project the tourist, 2002 video with audio 30:00 min projected on wall or screen, synchronized with video with audio 15:00 min,

presented in a domestic looking television


A projected video shows two Japanese women dressing a western woman (me) in a kimono. At the beginning the video renders a typical tourist experience captured by a hand held video camera. However, as the process of dressing becomes rather long and slightly awkward, there is a slow shift in the balance of who is looking and who is being looked upon. The role of the active subject inevitably shifts from the tourist to “the dressers”. The second video is presented in a domestic looking television next to this projected tourist footage and consist of a made-for-television program that presents step-by-step instructions for putting on a kimono. My Japanese friends watched this video that was originally recorded from Japanese television before they attempted to dress me, or on other occasions, dress each other. The two-part video installation addresses the common process of double essentialization. Double in the sense of essentializing women as having a natural instinct about how to make themselves beautiful and secondly, the essentialist exoticization of the “local” by the tourist.

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below: video stills from the two videos

Åsa Elzén

mail@asaelzen.com

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Forest Calling – A Never-ending Contaminated Collaboration

or Dancing is a Form of Forest Knowledge /


Skogen kallar – Ett oändligt kontaminerat samarbete eller

Dansandet är en form av skogskunskap


    – Extension #2 at The Experimental Field, Accelerator, SU

    – Extension #1 In Forest Intervals


Notes on a Fallow – The Fogelstad Group and Earth /

Träda – Fogelstadgruppen och jord


    – A Growing Fallow Archive / Ett växande träda-arkiv

    – Biography of a Fallow / En trädas biografi

    – Transcript of a Fallow / Avskrift av en Träda

    – Boy! / Pojken!

    – Fogelstad Fågelstad Fågelsta Fågelholk Fågelbo

    – The Other School / Den andra skolan

    – A Growing Archive on the Women’s Barn and Livestock

    School at Fogelstad / Ett växande arkiv över Kvinnliga

    Ladugårdsutbildningen vid Fogelstad

    – A Step to the Side / Ett steg åt sidan

    – A Growing Peace with the Earth Collection

    – Transcript of Transcripts: Elin – Bang /

    Avskrifter av avskrifter: Elin – Bang

    – Why do things when you could leave it? – An attempt,

    an in-between land / Varför gör man saker då man kunde

    låta bli? – Ett försök, ett gränsland


While I am trying to get to know Fredrika, I am always

thinking of you.


Memory of an Event

    – Memory of an Event I (Dear Honorine / Dearest Signe)

    – Memory of an Event II


History History

The Collaboration: MS and AL


Mary Wollstonecraft’s Scandinavian journey 1795 re-traced

    – The Glade I

    – The Glade II

    – Who Fooled Whom?


YES! Association/Föreningen JA!

    – A New Spelling of a Street – A tribute to Audre Lorde

    – All that you touch You Change. All that you Change

       Changes you.

    – NYPÅSTIGNA / NEW PASSENGERS

    – (art)work(sport)work(sex)work

    – Zyklische Gesellschaftsreise

    – SMOKING AREA

    – We Will Open a New Front/Lee H. Jones

    – (Dis)agreements?

    – When hell froze over


The guide and the seeing man

Project Description

I’ll be you if you’ll be me

A year of sisterhood

Getting Dressed

Bollywood Basketball