Roland Dahwen

Roland Dahwen

May 35

May 35 is a 12 minute, two-channel video installation that examines Tiananmen Square as a historical, touristic, regulated, and imaginary site. Tiananmen Square does not generate the usual image-production of touristic sites; May 35 is an oblique landscape, an imagined geography, a forgetting.

The title refers to the 4th of June, the anniversary of the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, known in China as the June Fourth Incident. The piece is part of the larger exploration around Tiananmen square as a place of historical memory and imagination in relation to image-production, tourism and its intersections with surveillance.

Roland Dahwen (1990, USA) is a filmmaker whose work explores migration, race and memory. His films and installations have shown at CalArts, Portland Art Museum, Time Based Art Festival, Northwest Film Center, and internationally in Brasil, Cuba, and the Netherlands. He was an artist-in-residence at Portland Institute for Contemporary Art’s Creative Exchange Lab (2018) and awarded the Oregon Media Arts Fellowship (2018). His works include Field Theories (with Samiya Bashir and keyon gaskin), Haft-Seen (with Stacey Tran and Jonathan Raissi), Ya no hay pбjaros en los nidos de ayer, and We are all the production line. His first feature film is forthcoming in 2019. He is the founder of Patua Films.

Original score and text by Roland Dahwen
Cantonese translation and voiceover by Sao Way Wu