Blink (2016–22)
Anyone who watches Blink for a while will gain an understanding of what it means not to see. The viewer is inundated with images, paced to a heartbeat, of fleeing families and groups of people. Anita Groener, who emigrated to Dublin from the Netherlands in 1982, obtained all the images from the internet and processed almost all of them into black and white silhouettes. The photos are both historical and current and are interspersed with pictures of the artist and her family. Recently, the work has been supplemented with news images from Ukraine.
Blink demonstrates the quick and frenetic manner in which historical traumas reach us through the omnipresent media. Is it possible to actually allow such suffering to enter our lives? Blink your eyes, out of surprise or horror, and you miss the next image. Although an individual image will appeal to our capacity for empathy, a deluge of them makes it almost impossible to escape a sense of moral indifference.