It is a great pleasure to present "JuJu White Magic", a new video work by Danish artist Gitte Villesen.

In a conversation with Café Sting's owner, Terje Vallestad told me a story about Amadou Sarr (a.k.a. Chilli Willi), a Gambian musician and knowledgeable practitioner of white magic. Vallestad related how in the middle of the night, Amadou, together with a local carpenter and Terje himself, removed a piece of the door step leading into the café to make an enclosure. Once finished, they placed a JuJu inside, then closed off the opening - making sure to efface any trace that the doorstep had been tampered with. Should you stand before the entrance of Café Sting, you will be overcome by the urge to step across its threshold, assured that something good will happen once inside. I decided to go to Gambia to talk with Amadou about JuJu's.

JuJu has its origin in West Africa and is related to voodoo. But since JuJu mainly deals with healing and protection it is called "white magic" in contrast to "black magic".

As a musician, Amadou is known by the pseudonym of "Chilli Willi" (referring to a type of tree found in Gambia). During the last 20 years he has played continually at Café Sting.

Rather than working from an outlook that focuses on (false) preconceptions about them and us, Villesen sets up an eye to eye meeting between the viewer and the persons portrayed in her videos. In "JuJu White Magic", Villesen introduces people with a distinctly different view of reality than ours. Instead of seeing reality as something fixed and predetermined that is to be understood empirically (as per the Western European tradition), the practitioners and users of JuJu experience reality that is bendable through the powers of talismans and evocations.

Gitte Villesen has shown extensively at galleries and museums in Europe and USA. Her work is in the permanent collections of Arken Museum of Modern Art Copenhagen (Ishøj, Denmark), KIASMA Museum of Contemporary Art (Helsinki, Finland), ARoS (Århus, Denmark), Moderna Musseet (Stockholm, Sweden), Statens Museum for Kunst (Copenhagen, Denmark), Samtidsmuseet Museum of Contemporary Art (Oslo, Norway), and Centre Pompidou (Paris, France).