Renée Holleman
(site under construction)

In 2010, the collective Doing it for Daddy was invited by Senegalese curator N’Gone Fall to participate in an exhibition in Denmark entitled 'Localities, Fictional and Real’, as part of the ‘My World Images Festival’.

On receiving the invitation we asked ourselves the question, 'What do we know about Denmark?', and realising we knew very little about Denmark, began to consider what the Danes might know about Africa. We had no idea.
 

With European tropes of colonial discovery firmly in mind, Doing it for Daddy set out to conduct an ethnographic study of Danish culture, exploring the dynamics of its social relations, history and material artifacts from the locus of an inherently South African perspective. Our research included interviews, YouTube videos of vikings, cooking traditional Danish meals, wandering flea markets, and when in Denmark undertaking a series of 'expeditions' to visit the Little Mermaid, a Safari Zoo, and the Karen Blixen Museum, among a number of other endeavors.
 
'There is a Lovely Land' takes its title from the Danish National Anthem, and attempts to make visible the mechanisms of the colonial gaze, and the ever-complicated relationship between Europe and the African continent through the role of the bold artist/explorer. In so doing, we collectively try to come to grips with the realities and fictions of our own locality, through the dislocations and diffractions of traveling to a place completely foreign, and Other, to that which we think we know.