Tina Enghoff

Tina Enghoff follow Danish, born 1957

Lives in Copenhagen, Denmark

Projects/Portfolios

Seven Years

Introduction

The social and political theme of SEVEN YEARS is the so-called ”seven years rule”, introduced by the Danish Government in 2001 in order to put a stop to marriages of convenience. The rule means that migrant women who have come to Denmark typical from non-Western countries: from the Middle East, Eastern Europe, Asia and Africa. via marriage with a man with a Danish citizenship can be expelled if they are divorced within their first seven years of marriage. As a consequence of this rule, a considerable number of women are in actual fact living isolated and in a state of virtual serfdom to the man who brought them here and whose goodwill they are totally dependent on. The husband has total power over the woman, and can more or less rule her life.

The seven year rule force many women to live in slavery-like marriages, stained by physical and psychological violence. If they do not subjugate themselves to their husband’s wishes, they face being forced to return to their native countries from which they came and where they will typically live as pariahs with prostitution as their only way of survival.

Some of these women's stories are presented as interviews in the accompanying book, and video installation in which single statements from interviews have been edited in a more fragmentary manner. In these, the women in different ways explain how they feel like nothing. They also tell their stories of how their husband deliberately and explicitly has used the fact that he had the absolute power and right of disposal over them for seven years.

Each of these photographs shows the actual migrant woman in a Danish landscape scene, anonymous in fear of her life. It is destinies from different Danish Crisis Centre for battered women where these women have gone after finally deciding not to stay in their violent marriages.

Each picture addresses an abstract, emotional and more general symbolic space, while at the same time making one aware that the posing woman in actual fact represents a real fate among us whose life conditions and basic human rights we, as a surplus society, might well try somewhat harder to improve. This is not a Third World country but Denmark where these men only by the means of a law can exercise their power, in means of violence.

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