Tate | Online project | Tarzan to Rambo

Over the Rainbow, 2000

Anthea Hamilton

Anthea Hamilton graduated from Leeds Metropolitan University in 2000 and since then has exhibited regularly in London and Leeds. She lives and works in London and is currently co-director of The Mission gallery in London.

Over the Rainbow, 2000
Video (4 mins)

A video of Hamilton singing Over the Rainbow is presented in negative, so that she appears 'white'. Her performance echoes Judy Garland in The Wizard of Oz, longing to escape the monochrome life of Kansas for a world of colour where 'the dreams that you dare to dream really do come true'. Like Boyce's From Tarzan to Rambo, Hamilton portrays herself in relation to classic Hollywood history. Perhaps ironic, perhaps heartfelt, this work creates a complex web of messages, from entrapment to escape, to exploration of other identities and experience, and finally perhaps suggesting a position beyond racial difference.

Harold Offeh

Harold Offeh graduated from the Royal College of Art in 2001 and has previously participated in numerous group exhibitions including Life. A User's Manual, the Baltic Sea Arts Centre Gdansk, Poland, 2001, New Contemporaries, Camden Arts Centre, London and Northern Gallery for Contemporary Art, Sunderland 2001, Juncture, The Granary, Cape Town, South Africa and Studio Voltaire, London, Headrush and Beck's Futures both at the ICA, London in 2000. He lives and works in London.

Four Ways to Feel Amazing, 2000
Video (3mins)

Borrowing from the vernacular of magazines and self-help manuals, Offeh's video offers the visitor a four-step plan to a better life. Crucially, a black actor functions as an everyman figure, facing universal human issues such as motivation and self-esteem. Despite its deadpan humour, the work illustrates the possibility of blackness achieving the same conditions of universality within western culture as whiteness.

Four Ways to Feel Amazing, 2000

Other Works in Focus: Pharmacy | Cold Dark Matter