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Image courtesy of the council of the National Army Museum, London |
Why Colonel Bunny Was Killed
The memoirs of a medical missionary on the Afghan borderlands provides the starting point for a film constructed from still photographs of colonial life on the North West frontier of British India at the turn of the 20th century. The film plays sound against image in a search for clues as to the stories behind images and finds striking continuities in Western portrayals of a distant place and people. Picture & sound edit Miranda Pennell & John Smith DVD publication by Filmarmalade. First public screening London International Film Festival, Experimenta Awards: Best international film/video at 2011 Courtisane Festival, Ghent (Be) 2011 Images Festival, Toronto (Ca)
Jury statement Courtisane 03.04.11 "The politics of difference and of inequality also hang above this work. Rephrasing the title of a photograph included in the film "Why Colonel Bunny Was Killed" transforms a caption into a statement, changing the status of the original as a means to interrogate the documentation of history. Using original documents to highlight the symbolism of power and thereby to exhume the clues left by the would-be-victors, the artist re-evaluates part of her own history to speak of a wider truth; at once to challenge the authority of the archive of supposedly impermeable documents and to reacquaint us, as a Western audience, with a degree of doubt about the legitimacy of our worldview. In doing so, the artist also illuminates an entirely contemporary yet parallel situation, and taken together, these elements speak not only of her personal resolve but of the circularity of history itself - and of its continuing bias for power and the powerful. Marina Kozul (HR), Vincent Meessen (BE/US), Adam Pugh (UK)
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