For Why Are You Angry? Rosalind Nashashibi and Lucy Skaer travelled to Tahiti following the steps of Paul Gauguin, 125 years after his first trip to the island. As a parallel investigation into the painter’s controversial presence in Tahiti and the complexities of making images today, the film is a poetic attestation of the juxtaposition of collective imagination and reality. To the stereotyped depictions of Gauguin, softly recalled through a series of tableaux vivants, the artists reacted with a slow observation of a group of Tahitian women, taking the female figure as their subject. A certain tenderness is perceived in the effort of the artists to re-humanise the women exoticised by the painter, to evoke the diversity of their subjectivities.

The idea of the film was first discussed with the artists in 2013 and the production was carried our throughout 2017, when the film premièred at documenta 14.

Alongside their individual practices, Rosalind Nashashibi and Lucy Skaer have been making collaborative works since 2005.

EXHIBITIONS:

— Frac Ile-de-France (2019)
— Tate, St. Ives (2018 - 2019)
— KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin (2017)
— Tate Modern, London (2017)
— documenta 14, The National Museum of Contemporary Art, Athens (2017)

IN THE COLLECTION OF:

— Lafayette Anticipations – Fondation d'entreprise Galeries Lafayette, Paris
— Tate, St. Ives
— Frac Ile-de-France, Paris

For further reading, you can download here The Communicative Power of Silence: Why Are You Angry?, article written by Minou Norouzi, originally published in Another Gaze August 2019 issue.