Jeannette Ehlers’ hypnotic video work Black Bullets now on display at Touch exhibition

Black Bullets is an homage to the Haitian revolution of 1791. On the black-and-white video work, dark human figures walk in a line across the video nonstop to the beat of a drone-like soundscape. As they walk, the figures gradually merge into their reflections and finally disappear into the horizon. The work has been filmed against the Haitian sky on a mountain-top fortalso known as a symbol for the emancipation from slavery. The fort was built by the first black Haitian monarch Henri Christophe, after the revolution at the start of the 19th century to defend the independent Haiti against the French.

“Jeannette Ehlers’ Black Bullets is a hypnotic and minimalist piece, whichhas a powerful influence beyond its historical starting points. Themes of power dynamics and the battle against oppression strongly link the work to this day,” describes Laura Kokkonen, curator of the Touch exhibition.

Jeannette Ehlers (b. 1973) is a Danish-Trinidadian artist known for utilising image manipulation and her own body to address memory, structures of racism and colonialism in her works. Black Bullets is a reminder of the slaveryin Haitipracticed by colonial France,known as one of the cruelest periods of forced labour. The Haitian revolution is the only successful revolution by enslaved Africans in history and set the scene for Haiti’s independence in 1804. In her work, Ehlers highlights that history is not the past – colonialism can still be seen through the distribution of power and resources, both globally and in the Nordics.

Black Bullets is the second work in the media artseries as a part of Listening to Silenceof the Touch exhibition, which opened in autumn 2021. The works of the section explore the different dimensions of humans’ inner world, including past events, traumas and ways of processing them. After Black Bullets, the series welcomes its final work in the autumn, The Fantastic by Maija Blåfield.