Analysis Of Millie Chen's Tour

Millie Chen's Tour was presented in the Albright-Knox's Gallery for New Media, a small black box screening room with surround sound and a projection wall. The multimedia installation was comprised of four movements presented in a loop, each documenting the artist's visit to a particular site of historical genocide. Handheld footage of the locations segues seamlessly from one to the other in the film, interspersed with unobtrusive titling presenting the location's name and the date of the genocidal event: Murambi, Rwanda (April 16-22, 1994); Choeung Ek, Cambodia (April 17, 1975--January 7, 1979); Treblinka, Poland (July 23, 1942--October 19, 1943); and Wounded Knee, USA (December 29, 1890).

The soundtrack is an evocative mix of traditional singing in Rwandan, Khmer, Yiddish, and Lakota. The music is matched to the imagery of its country of origin, though it too blends seamlessly from one site to the next. Despite the difference in the singers' languages and the instrumentation, the songs are surprisingly similar in their keening resonance.
Chen quotes Hannah Arendt in her statement about the piece, and the banality of the scenery, juxtaposed with the viewer's knowledge of the sites' histories, intentionally brings to mind Arendt's famous maxim about the "banality of