Jane Jin Kaisen, ed. Loving Belinda, Forlaget * [asterisk], 2015.
The Loving Belinda project began in 2006 with the video Adopting Belinda in which Mr. and Mrs. Anderson, a supposedly Asian-American couple in Minnesota, are being interviewed by a Danish TV host for a series on Danish heritage because they have just adopted Belinda, a white girl from Denmark. Everything appears ordinary with the exception that the racial and cultural dynamics are reversed.
The Loving Belinda Project employs the mockumentary genre, appropriating documentary features to destabilize reality with subversive effect. By staging and reversing the racial “order” within transnational adoption, the works expose some of the uneven economic, racial, and cultural relations of power that are embedded within the practice but that tend to remain unspoken.
The videos Revisiting the Andersons and Loving Belinda as well as the photograph The Andersons from 2015,portray how the family is coping now whenBelinda is nine years old in the midst of changing discourses around transnational adoption.
In the Loving Belinda publication, the fictional universe is contextualized by conversations between the individuals involved in the project, whom in reality are all engaged in critical discourse around transnational adoption, anti-racism and whiteness in Scandinavia.
Contents:
LOVING BELINDA
Adopting Belinda
Revisiting the Andersons
Loving Belinda
The Andersons
CONVERSATIONS
Tobias Hübinette & Jane Jin Kaisen: Transnational Adoption in the Context of Colonial Repression, Race Relations, and the Right-wing Turn in Scandinavia,
Morten Goll & Jane Jin Kaisen: Reflections on Art, Asylum Politics, Racism, and Transnational Adoption
Lene Myong & Jane Jin Kaisen: The Emergence of Adoption Critiques among Transnational Adoptees in Denmark
ESSAYS / PRESENTATIONS
Marianne Ping Huang: Artistic Research as Critique in Jane Jin Kaisen’s Loving Belinda
Louise Wolthers: Framing the Migrant Body
Tone Olaf Nielsen: Curating Anti-Racist, Pro-Migration & Decolonial Projects
http://janejinkaisen.com/loving-belinda-200615