Hip Hip Today
Larissa Sansour. Hip Hip Today, 2007.
Description:
The photo is a contemporary digital paraphrase of P.S. Kroeyer’s painting Hip Hip Hurra (1888) – depicting a group of people from the artistic colony in Skagen. The original set-up is recreated in Kroeyer’s actual garden. The details are of the utmost importance – everything from the posture and facial expressions of the participants to the china, bottles and cutlery on the table are as true to the original painting as possible.
All seven men in the original painting are replaced by well known contemporary women artists in Denmark. The three women are played by men.
With its focus on gender and ethnicity, Hip Hip Today is a social and political art piece demographically and ethnically challenging the distribution of values in a contemporary Danish setting. The piece is a comment on a Danish cultural scene that is slowly changing in its set of values, gender and international make up contrasting sharply with the artistic community of Kroeyer’s time. The aim is to expose the idea still tacitly prevalent today of Danes being a socially, culturally, politically and ethnically homogenous people - spearheaded by an elite differing in ethnic and social composition only marginally compared to that at the time of Kroeyer.
Medium:
Photography
Tags:
digital photograph, politics, gender, ethnicity, identity, feminism, integration, Denmark
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