2018
Digital print mounted on paper with aluminium backing
240 x 60 cm
“Haven’t you noticed suddenly I’m bright and breezy?”
In an iconic scene in the 1956 film The King and I, Anna Leonowens, based on the real-life English schoolteacher of the children of King Mongkut of Siam, breaks into a song-and-dance about making friends (“Getting to Know You”). As she spins around, her massive skirt becomes an uncanny double of the fan she holds in her hand as a prop for her dance. This figuration of the white woman as a Great Fan further mirrors the song’s celebration of the “breeziness” of global interactions. If “Getting to Know You” is a song about globalisation, the white woman here, in turning herself into a fan, and turning the fan into metaphor, marks the abstraction of circulation as a general condition of a world where things must always keep moving.