Tag Me if You Can (2021)

Overview

Tag Me if You Can combines found footage of daily expressions on social media, blurring the distinction between private and public spaces. These sequences are accompanied by a selection of mainstream commercials that star Saudis, rather than people from abroad, owing to the rising popularity - or what the artist calls "the new media revolution" - of home videos, YouTube shows, and vlogs. Through inlays and cut editing, Anhar Salem breaks the strict opposition between these two regimes of images, the first related to television and the second to individual expressions. Her red Zentai suit-clad performance recreate wedding rituals in the kingdom to a score that includes commercial jingles, matrimonial songs and K-Pop tunes sung by young Arab girls. By using Instagram's red filter, she presents different social media practices on an everyday scale while further masking the identities of the performers, creating, as it were, vacuums in the map of the internet.

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