Tina Enghoff

Threshold of Pain

2010

Threshold of Pain, a 3 screen videoinstallation. Part of the Seven Years project. The videoinstallation should be seen as statements from 12 different women all being family reunificated from diffrent countries in the world. All of them ending up in a Crises Center for Women or in a Refugee Camp in Denmark. Each of them have their own story and put together in fragments, shifting between different languages, shown in a closed room with 3 screens in angels ( each 4 x 3 meter) becomes the story of all women as the danish writer Kirsten Thorup writes in her foreword to the book Seven Years:
[...]
"These mistreated women are being subjected to a statutory threshold of pain lasting seven years. Where do we cross over the line of our own threshold of pain? How long can we live with the fact that women who incontrovertibly possess the status of residing legally in Denmark for years are sometimes being compelled to live in disgracefully abject and debasing circumstances? Must we, as citizens of a democracy, simply accept that “family-reunified” women who wind up in violence-scarred marriages are living here as pariahs without any legal rights? And that they are being dumped like garbage back in their home countries if and when they can no longer cope with the everyday violence that is being dished out? Or when they get discarded by the husband who has found another new young woman from a Third World country and can simply continue, facing virtually no risks, wreaking his violent assaults?
One of the qualities that makes us human beings human is empathy, the ability to stand in somebody else’s shoes and identify with their plight, the capacity to take delight or to suffer and feel in synchronicity with our fellow human beings. However, merely to imagine the nightmare that each one of these battered women is living through, simply to imagine their sense of dread and their pain is unbearable. Equally unbearable appears to be the callous cynicism and flagrant contempt for human life manifested and embodied in the Danish legislation proposed in Article 11, paragraph 3 of the Aliens (Consolidation) Act (No. 945 of 1 September 2006) and the administration thereof.
[...]
 
Stills from 12:27 min. video work
Denmark, 2010
Director: Tina Enghoff
in collaboration with Uzma Ahmed
Editing: Anders Refn
Filming: Tina Enghoff

VIDEO PIECES

• Threshold of Pain

  
  

  1:15min Excerpt from the 12:27 min videoinstallation. Shown in a 3 screen installation, 4x3 meter each screen.