One minute. One body. One empire. Ready to have your brain rewired?
Commissioned by the Whitney Museum of American Art and The American Center in Paris as part of their international Trans Voices project, Nation flashes contradictory formulations of language, politics, and medicine across a sharp and close screen. Blurring geography with the body's landscape, Nation reminds us that our bodies, like land, have been shaped by history into zones to be charted, conquered, divided, or made whole. "Think globally act locally," in one dense minute.
Editing
Rapid-fire juxtapositions that assault then seduce.
Direction
Kalin packs a thesis into sixty seconds.
Director
Tom Kalin
Trivia, insights & behind the scenes
Part of Trans Voices, a 1992 initiative explicitly supporting queer artists during the height of the AIDS crisis — this context reshapes every medical image.
Kalin's title 'Nation' weaponizes the very word used to exclude queer and colonized bodies from citizenship, reclaiming it as something inscribed on flesh itself.
US
