In Wonderland

Video + Performance + Sculpture Bullet Armour Dress

In Wonderland is an interdisciplinary project that explores through video, photography, drawings, and sculptural elements the notion of power struggle in various locations of the world described in political literature as “Third World” or “South”. Josephine Turalba plays on the universal memory of the audience and their acquaintance with the fable of Alice in Wonderland to propose that all and everyone exists in the artist-assumed wonderland, a wonderland of continuous conflict. In the three-minute video, a goddess comes out of the fields, dressed up in a bullet dress (fabricated by the artist in Schöppingen, Germany last year out of around 3000 bullets and shotgun shells). This almost science fiction protagonist walks on asphalt, a road within the fields, flirts with camera, and goes back to the mysterious wonderland, never be seen again.

The ambient sounds used in the video, also shot in Schöppingen in 2011, are composed of a juxtaposition of harsh metal sound of the bullets and shotgun shells of the dress dragging on the road, as the goddess-protagonist dwells, and the serene sound of wind and windmills. The images depict the artist playing a mixed role of goddess of the fields, as well as a vulnerable human engulfed in bullets, both roles engage audience to contemplate the thin line between fiction and reality.