Banda Aceh

Based on a single frame taken from a television report on the French rescue operation following the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami. A French firefighter holds an elderly Indonesian man in his arms as he weeps. The shot almost literally reproduces the visual codes of paternalistic colonial imagery: the framing, the protective gesture, the white man in a position of authority facing someone portrayed as vulnerable and dependent. The painting extracts and freezes an image from the continuous flow of the media narrative. By giving it a duration the moving sequence does not allow, it creates the possibility of stopping to examine what the image shows and the representations it carries. Here, that pause reveals the persistence of paternalistic colonial imagery within contemporary humanitarian narratives.