SARAH BIJLSMA

VIDEO	MANDARIJN / 2011 / 16'19'' With: Wynolt Pietersma and Yongmin Zhou Mandarijn (Mandarin) is a three screen video-installation. It is portrait of two men, a farmer in Friesland and a bachelor in China. The Farmer desperately wants to have a girl after the birth of his eight sons, and the Chinese man is looking for a women to marry. Both of them are talking about the person they miss as if that person really exists. The farmer is imagining his live with his daughter, describes her personality and also his own, which will change when he’ll be a girls father. The bachelor is doing the same thing, he is describing love for us, and how women are as lovers. Not only are the farmer and Chinese thinking about the girl and wife as archetypes, they also place themselves into a certain role. In the end you can question yourself if they are still real people with real desires, or if they made themselves into characters with the desires they think people want them to have. Mandarijn is a film about identity and loneliness. The film is a feminist film, because it deals with the question how men see women and what they expect them to be. It wonders about how the construction between the differences in sexes works. Do little girls really like to colour pink so much, as if their genes tell them so, or is it because the are told to like it from the moment the were born? At the same time, it is an invesitgation in how the meaning of a work of art changes when the context of it changes. In this work, Sarah Bijlsma tried to get rid of or at least change the context of videoart, by making a work that is filled with film aspects. Because the installation is really a story with characters, it is different than regular video pieces in art galleries. At the same time, when this piece is shown as a film in a cinema, for instance, it is nothing like regular movies because it is shot with several camera's. By doing this it fit in the context of videoart nor the context of film and researches the twilight zone between them.

MANDARIJN / 2011 / 16'19''

With: Wynolt Pietersma and Yongmin Zhou

Mandarijn (Mandarin) is a three screen video-installation.

It is portrait of two men, a farmer in Friesland and a bachelor in China. The Farmer desperately wants to have a girl after the birth of his eight sons, and the Chinese man is looking for a women to marry. Both of them are talking about the person they miss as if that person really exists. The farmer is imagining his live with his daughter, describes her personality and also his own, which will change when he’ll be a girls father. The bachelor is doing the same thing, he is describing love for us, and how women are as lovers. Not only are the farmer and Chinese thinking about the girl and wife as archetypes, they also place themselves into a certain role. In the end you can question yourself if they are still real people with real desires, or if they made themselves into characters with the desires they think people want them to have. Mandarijn is a film about identity and loneliness. The film is a feminist film, because it deals with the question how men see women and what they expect them to be. It wonders about how the construction between the differences in sexes works. Do little girls really like to colour pink so much, as if their genes tell them so, or is it because the are told to like it from the moment the were born?

At the same time, it is an invesitgation in how the meaning of a work of art changes when the context of it changes. In this work, Sarah Bijlsma tried to get rid of or at least change the context of videoart, by making a work that is filled with film aspects. Because the installation is really a story with characters, it is different than regular video pieces in art galleries. At the same time, when this piece is shown as a film in a cinema, for instance, it is nothing like regular movies because it is shot with several camera's. By doing this it fit in the context of videoart nor the context of film and researches the twilight zone between them.