LE CORAN - L'HOLOCAUST - LE JOUR DE GLOIRE

In flashing black and white letters and backgrounds, these works comprise words spelling out three cryptic and troubling short sentences, flashed onto the screens of three monitors, and appearing and disappearing at various speeds; ‘Le Coran, ça je ne connais pas’, ‘L’Holocaust n’est qu’un detail dans l’Histoire’ and ‘Le jour de gloire est arrivé’. Drawn from diverse sources – the negation of Shoah found in the discourse of Jean Marie Le Pen, the words to the French national anthem – the Marseillaise - and from the West’s general indifference and ignorance concerning Islam (a dialogue from Claude Lanzmann’s film ‘Tsahal’ from 1994), Augustijnen uses these fragments of contentious discourse at a particluar moment in time, to places us in a difficult position. Indeed, as these words come and go, the viewer has to resist being hypnotized by the strange messages whose problematic status rests both on their lack of clear immediate context and on the troubling apocalyptic dialogue that emerges in their interaction.