The Blind Date project is about five confrontations of five pairs of artists. During a short period prior to the World Wide Video Festival they react to each other's work and thinking. This will result in five combined presentations.
Since the mid-90's Wallin has been investigating what constitutes our concepts of normality and difference. For a number of years, this investigation has taken its starting point in the representation of the handicapped or physically defect body, as opposed to the perfect body and society's relation to it. Tracing our notion of normality and difference back to Antiquity's and Christianity's division of the world into heaven and hell, good and evil, beauty and ugliness, Wallin uses the handicapped body as a metaphor for that which is different and thus dangerous, confronting us with our fear of deviation and our comfort in sameness. Playing on the supposed threat of difference to the totality of our order, Wallin equips his characters with a voice of their own that brings them out of their cultural invisibility and counters society's marginalization of the handicapped. 'Exit', a computer animated video installation, is conceived as a dream sequence in which eight characters, each with a different handicap, make an attempt to escape from a raging fire in a one kilometre long corridor. Just as most of the characters in the video cannot move fast enough due to their severe handicap and end up being caught by the fire, it is often due to a physical defect that in our nightmares we are unable to move forward fast enough when being chased. Wallin plays upon the viewer's own experience of being disabled in a dream situation, and a process of cross-identification unrolls. Watching the video the viewer becomes the other – the phantom in other people's minds or the figure in a nightmare.
Wallin's blind date is Dutch artist Ronald Ophuis.
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Magnus Wallin, (Sweden)
Lives and works in Malmö (Sweden)
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1 9 9 8 
