[2008] Remake (Architectural Overdub)

Wood construction, paint, fabric, two rear-projection videos
Dimensions variable (approx. 400 x 400 x 225 cm)

Remake (Architectural Overdub) refers to the phenomenon of remakes of foreign movies in the (Hollywood) film industry, in particular issues of cultural appropriation within translation processes of culture-specific architecture. The starting point of the project was the U.S. horror shocker The Grudge (2004), a Hollywood remake of the Japanese original Ju-on (2002), produced for a mass Western audience. For the U.S. film version, a traditional Japanese house, based on "typical" Japanese architectural fragments was redesigned as a film stage, one created naturally to be more comfortable for the large-scale technical filming process.

Remake (Architectural Overdub) again translates this film stage into the exhibition space in a creative process, adapting a technique similar to that of "dubbing" (the synchronizing of a film into a different language). The individual architectural fragments of the installation relate only vaguely to its original and are interpretations pointing to the complexities that occur when translating from one cultural system into another: The setting includes the gaps, errors and misunderstandings of inter-cultural translation processes by playing with formal aspects that might be recognized by a Western viewer as "typical Japanese", but are in fact no more than a cultural and cinematic cliché.