Maja Bajević was born in Sarajevo in 1967. She graduated from the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts, Paris, in 1996. Maja Bajević’s work involves different modes of expression: performance, video, installation, and photography. Bajević has had her work included in exhibitions such as the Venice, Istanbul, and Tirana biennials and Manifesta 3. She has had solo exhibitions at institutions such as Fondazione Bevilacqua La Masa, Palazzetto Tito, Venice (2007); National Gallery of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Sarajevo (2006); Moderna Museet, Stockholm (2005); Galerie Michel Rein, Paris (2005); Museum of Modern Art, Belgrade (2004); PS1, Long Island City (2004); and [plug.in], Basel (2002). Group exhibitions include Documenta 12, Kassel (2007); the Centre Pompidou, Paris (2007); the Grand Palais, Paris (2006); Basis voor Actuele Kunst (BAK), Utrecht (2005); the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (2005); and apexart, New York (2003), among many others. Maja Bajević lives and works in Paris and Sarajevo.

THE WORK

Double Bubble, 2001, 3 min. 48 sec.
Video projection

The video projection Double Bubble by Bosnian artist Maja Bajević illustrates an infiltration of militarized violence into religion, culture, belief, sexual relations, and speech. Addressing the camera, the narrator repeats contradictory statements that depend on a logic issued from forces of violence as arbitrator. In the video, acts of oppression emerging out of accounts of atrocities committed during Yugoslavia’s civil war are casually justified in the name of religion.

In Double Bubble, the narrator uses a double voice—from the artist’s mouth and in a simultaneous voiceover—to merge an ideological-authorial voice with that of the speaker, a seemingly “uninvolved” woman. The double voice also remits the viewer’s voice, not only hinting at audience complicity towards violence, but also implicating audience desire for “experiencing” it from afar. Phrases repeat, including expressions embracing fear of sex, aggressive masochism, violence as part of worship and belief—emphasizing tendencies for culture’s self-representation to condition belief as prayer conditions faith. The mind that becomes familiarized to and conditioned by violence is here represented by Bajević, an artist outraged by the spiral of violence in Bosnia. This work confronts, in a sense, a “voice” of war as projected onto the body of the populace. It also demonstrates war’s inscription on social behaviours, and its dependency on these behaviors. Finally, it speaks to how belief and culture may be transformed under the sway of violence, becoming in effect forms of war themselves.

EXPLORE

• the notion of voice and how it functions in Double Bubble;
• the use of repetition and its effects.

ADDITIONAL SOURCES OF INFORMATION

Dhillon, Kim. The Site of Production : Maja Bajević’s New Work in Sarajevo. n. paradoxa 16 (2005) : 60-74.

Pejić, Bojana. Maja Bajević : The Matrix of Memory. Textile 5.1 (2007) : 66-87.

Dominique Blain lives and works in Montreal. Her work has been exhibited at the Sydney Biennale (1992), the Kunstverein, Frankfurt (1993), the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (1995) and the Louisiana Museum, Copenhagen (1996). Solo exhibitions include the Arnolfini Gallery, Bristol (1997); Laing Art Gallery, Newcastle Upon Tyne (1997); Ormeau Baths Gallery, Belfast (1997); Musée National des Beaux-arts du Québec, Quebec City; the Ansel Adams Center, San Francisco; Sala 1, Rome (1998); the Museum of Science and Industry, Manchester (1998); Galerie de l’UQAM, Montreal (2004); the MacKenzie Art Gallery, Regina (2006); and the Nickle Arts Museum, Calgary (2007). Blain has also created several public works for the Jardins de Métis, Métis-sur-mer, Quebec (2007); the Quartier International de Montreal (2006); the Grande Bibilothèque du Quebec, Montreal (2005); the Sinclair-Laird primary school, Montreal (2000); the Canadian Broadcasting Centre, Toronto (1994); the Maison des Écrivains, Montreal (1991); and the Museum of Europe, Brussels (2008).

THE WORK

Stars and Stripes, 1993
Silkscreen on canvas
Edition of 10

These silkscreened banners use the shape of a potential flag of a sovereign nation, whether democratic or totalitarian, as well as photographs resembling military propaganda of the body as ‘nation-builder’ and the machine as instrument of warfare. Within the university architecture, alongside university banners, these ‘flags’ transform the space of this building into a site of war and its imagery; highlighting the proximity, whether visual, virtual or actual, that contemporary life and institutions have to recent history and current conflicts.

EXPLORE

• the flag, its function and its meaning, and the ways in which Dominique Blain’s flags either conform to or break with these;
• the significance of the physical context into which these flags have been introduced and how they interact with it.

ADDITIONAL SOURCES OF INFORMATION

Bradley, Jessica. Dominique Blain. Lethbridge, Alberta : Southern Alberta Art Gallery, 2008.

Déry, Louise. Dominique Blain. Médiation. Québec : Musée du Québec, 2004.

Déry, Louise, Georges Leroux, Anne-Marie Ninacs., and John R. Porter. Monuments : Considérations sur l’art et la guerre autour d’une œuvre de Dominique Blain. Montreal: Galerie de l’UQAM, 2004.

Lussier, Réal. Dominique Blain. Montreal : Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, 2004.

Paul Chan was born in Hong Kong in 1973. He was raised in Nebraska and currently lives and works in New York. He received an MFA from Bard College in 2002 and a BFA from the Art Institute of Chicago in 1996. He is represented by Greene Naftali, New York, and recent solo exhibitions include the Serpentine Gallery, London (2007); the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (2007); Portikus, Frankfurt (2006); Galleria Massimo De Carlo, Milan (2006); the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston (2005); and the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2005). Group exhibitions include the Whitney Biennial (2006); Uncertain States of America, Astrup Fearnley Museet for Moderne Kunst, Oslo (2006); Utopia Station, World Social Forum, Porto Alegre, Brazil (2005); I Still Believe in Miracles, Musee d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris (2005); Greater New York, PS1, Long Island City (2005); and New Work/New Acquisitions, the Museum of Modern Art, New York (2005).

THE WORKS

Tin Drum Trilogy, 2002-2005, 112 min.
Digital video projection
Courtesy of the Greene Naftali Gallery, New York.

Tin Drum Trilogy is an experimental critique of American political life in the 21st century consisting of three parts:

Re: The Operation, 2002, 28 min.
The first video is based on a set of drawings that depict members of the George W. Bush administration as wounded soldiers in the war against terrorism. Re: The Operation explores the sexual and philosophical dynamics of war through the lives of those administration members as they physically engage with each other and the “enemy”. Letters, notes, and other textual ephemera written by “Bush” and others are narrated and accompanied by digital snapshots from around the world as they articulate the neuroses and obsessions that drive them toward infinite war.

Baghdad in No Particular Order, 2003, 51 min.
This piece is a video essay on life in Baghdad immediately before the American invasion and occupation. Videographed by Chan and a host of Iraqis working with Voices in the Wilderness, a Nobel peace prize nominated activist group working in Iraq to stop the drive for war, Baghdad… intimately portrays Iraqis singing, dancing, and struggling as they await the coming of another war.

Now Promise Now Threat, 2005, 33 min.
Part documentary, part visual manifesto, this piece uses Omaha, Nebraska as a site and subject to follow the often unexpected lines connecting people, religion and politics in “red state” America. An evangelical pastor opposes the mixing of church and state on religious grounds. An anti-abortion mother deplores the hypocrisy of the pro-life movement for being pro-war. A young man wants to die for his country so he can–at last–have a life worthy of living. Now Promise Now Threat mixes interviews with locally produced footage and kidnapping videos from Iraq transformed into fields of undulating color to create a moving “apologia” for the united red states of America.

EXPLORE

• the investigation of subjectivity and objectivity in Paul Chan’s work;
• the kinds of sources that are referenced in this work and the ways in which appropriated material is employed.

ADDITIONAL SOURCES OF INFORMATION

McClister, Neil. Paul Chan. Bomb 92 (2005) : 22-29.

Obrist, Hans-Ulrich. Paul Chan. Contemporary 84 (2006) : 34-37.

Rothkopf, Scott. Embedded in the Culture of Paul Chan. Artforum 44 (2006) : 304-311.

Bureau d’Études, a Paris-based conceptual group, has been producing maps and charts of contemporary political, social, and economic systems since 1998. These large-format visual analyses of transnational capitalism are based on extensive collaborative research. By depicting networks that usually remain invisible, their work reveals data-gathering systems that exist between individuals, international companies, governments, armed forces, global agencies, and citizens’ groups. These visualizations of property relations function as unconventional tools for examining current global issues. Their work has been included in numerous exhibitions and symposia throughout Europe and North America, including The Future of the Reciprocal Readymade (the use-value of art) at apexart, New York (2004); Utopia Station at the 50th Venice Biennale (2003); and Diffusion: Collaborative Practice in Contemporary Art at the Tate Modern, London (2003).

THE WORKS

For ten years, Bureau d’Études has produced complex illustrations of global networks between dictatorships, military apparatuses, politicians, celebrities, businessmen, and capital. These detailed displays of oligarchic networks bring human faces to inhuman systems. The two-dimensional design Archaeology depicts connections between American universities, military structures, and those who profit from these alliances. The other design, The Bohemian Club, illustrates an association of powerful men in the California-based “gentleman’s club” that allegedly meets each July. It has also been alleged that at these retreats, political futures have been decided for decades—from plotting wars to corporate takeovers and handovers to the consolidation of American power amidst a handful of Republicans. Despite the seemingly inevitable and uncontrollable movements of power and capital in an abstracted international market, human complexes are ascertained and faces named.

Archaeology, 2005
Digital print on vinyl

The Bohemian Club, 2005
Digital print on vinyl

EXPLORE

• the type of illustration used in this work. Is it familiar and if so, why?;
• the notion of connections, both making them and illustrating them, and why this is an important strategy in this work.

ADDITIONAL SOURCES OF INFORMATION

Bureau d’Études, official Web site http://bureaudetudes.free.fr/

Wright, Stephen. The Delicate Essence of Artistic Collaboration. Third Text 18.71 (2004) : 533-545.

Wright, Stephen. The Future of the Reciprocal Readymade : An Essay on Use Value and Art-Related Practice. Parachute 117 (2005) : 119-138.

Köken Ergun was born in Istanbul in 1976. He studied in the Istanbul University Acting Department, followed by a postgraduate diploma in ancient Greek theatre at London’s King’s College. He holds a master’s degree from the Istanbul Bilgi University Department of Visual Communication Design and is currently a doctoral candidate in the Theatre Dramaturgy Department of Istanbul University. His videos and performances have been presented at the Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki; Platform Garanti Contemporary Art Center, Istanbul; Exit Art, New York; Art in General, New York; Badischer Kunstverein, Karlsruhe; Sparwasser HQ, Berlin; and Skulpturens Hus, Stockholm. Ergun has been an artist-in-residence at Location One, New York (2004), Künstlerhauser Worpswede, Germany (2006) and the Foreign Artist Exchange of the Austrian Government, Vienna (2006). He was the recipient of the Sphinx Award for best video for The Flag and I, Soldier at the Videomedeja Festival in Novi Sad, Serbia (2007).

THE WORKS

In both these videos, Köken Ergun makes a direct and discrete visualization of military events. The videos act as commentary on the specific political context of Turkey today, outlining perils of ultra-nationalism, and enabling a new reading of the survival of 20th Century state rituals.

The Flag, 2006, 9 min. 1 sec.
Double video projection (with I, Soldier)

Bayrak (The Flag) offers a glimpse of annual ceremonies held in Turkey to commemorate the fall of the Ottoman Empire and the creation of the nation’s parliament under the leadership of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the soldier, revolutionary statesman, founder and first president of Turkey. Atatürk had set out to create a new republic under democratic and rationalist-enlightenment ideas. In Turkey, April 23rd is Children’s Day. Youth from across the nation are brought to Istanbul to take part in solemn ceremonies honoring their nation, flag and government — presentations that the children have no role in creating, despite their central role in the spectacle.

I, Soldier, 2005, 7 min., 14 sec.
Double video projection (with The Flag)

I, Soldier is a video of the militaristic ceremony of May 19th, the national holiday for Turkish independence. This contemporary and tightly-orchestrated spectacle, involving the precise choreography of schoolchildren and military parades, as well as enormous, participatory crowds of spectators, is reminiscent of a totalitarian display of power from both communist, as well as National Socialist systems. The facial expressions of an individual soldier in slow-motion, as well as the diptych format of the presentation (like with The Flag), aim to capture the humanity below (and within, thus feeding) the spectacle.

EXPLORE

• what this work reveals and how;
• the artist’s use of representations of tightly orchestrated spectacles in this work. What does this achieve and what kinds of relationships does it establish between the visual, the historical and the political?

ADDITIONAL SOURCES OF INFORMATION

Antmen, Ahu. Art Hits the Street. Flash Art 35.227 (2003) : 49.

Ergun, Köken and November Paynter. The Inspiration of Home. PAJ: A Journal of Performance Art 29.1 (2007) : 101-112.

Köken Ergun. Video Data Bank. 20 August 2008 http://www.vdb.org/smackn.acgi$artistdetail?ERGUNK

Omer Fast was born in Jerusalem in 1972, and lives and works in Berlin. His works explore the various possibilities offered by the moving image: possibilities of expressing emotions, of confronting personal stories with public concerns, of concentrating on individuals or integrating their environments in a broader historical context. The borders of the documentary film genre begin to blur when Fast links and manipulates the collective imagery and the individual subconscious on the same layer of his medium. Solo exhibitions have included the Museum of Modern Art, Vienna (2007); Vox, centre de l’image contemporaine, Montreal (2007); the Carnegie Museum, Pittsburgh (2005); Postmasters, New York (2005); and the Kunstverein, Frankfurt (2003). Group exhibitions have included the Centre Pompidou, Paris (2007); the Auckland Art Gallery (2006); the Kunst-werke, Berlin; the Museum of Fine Arts, Basel (2005); Witte de With, Rotterdam (2003); the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2002); and PS1, Long Island City (2001).

THE WORK

A Tank Translated, 2002
4 channel video with sound

Arranged on four monitors in the structure of a tank, A Tank Translated, compiles footage of separate conversations with four crew members of an Israeli Army tank. Each crew member (commander, driver, gunner and loader) was interviewed separately after being released from mandatory military duty. Questions asked by the artist include a focus on the perception of the environment each tank member was in — both the interior space of the tank as well as that surrounding the tank.

The conversations were conducted in Hebrew, then edited and translated faithfully with running subtitles. However, the translated text begins to chip away at itself through manipulation by the artist. The speakers’ words disappear, others morph into new words, creating a subtext that not only questions the validity of documentary film and the ever-shifting nature of history, but reveals how language – when examined – has an inherent leaning towards ideological apparatuses within its very structure and wording, even within casual conversation. The interviews also reveal the grip that the Israeli military has upon the bodies and lives of these – and many other – young, Israelis.

EXPLORE

• perspective and perception, in terms of both content and presentation;
• the ways in which language functions in this work.

ADDITIONAL SOURCES OF INFORMATION

Allen, Jennifer. Openings : Omer Fast. Artforum 42.1 (2003) : 216-217.

Feuvre, Lisa. Omer Fast Iniva London. Art Monthly 290 (2005) : 26-27.

Kendell Geers was born in 1968 in Johannesburg, South Africa. His work often references political issues, racial politics, and violence in South Africa. Geers has participated in major group shows and biennials including Documenta 11, Kassel (2002); States of Emergency, Vienna Secession (1999); Trade Routes: History and Geography, 2nd Johannesburg Biennale (1997); New Works: 98.3, ArtPace, San Antonio (1998); Global Conceptualism: Points of Origin 1950s–1980s, Queens Museum of Art, New York (1999); Traffique, S.M.A.K., Ghent (1999); and High Red Centre, Centre for Contemporary Arts, Glasgow (1999). Solo shows of Geers’s work have been presented since 1988, including exhibitions at MACRO, Rome (2004); Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg (1991); Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2002); Stephen Friedman Gallery, London (1999); de Vleeshal, Middelburg (1997); and Villa Arson, Nice (1995). Geers received the ArtPace: A Foundation for Contemporary Art’s International Artist-in-Residence award in 1998.

THE WORK

Title Withheld (Rock), 1992, 2 min., 16 sec.
Video

The footage depicted in this video is of a lynch mob in South Africa torturing, to the point of death, a suspected police spy. The video is accompanied by the voice of the Belgian surrealist painter, Rene Magritte, speaking about his work. After being invited to participate in this exhibition on art, war and war’s representations, Geers submitted this work specifically as a partial critique of the project’s intent. In correspondence with the curator, Geers wrote, “as I said from the very beginning such shows make me very nervous and when I see the list of artists I begin to see my fears becoming very real. I was born into an “age of terror” and have never known anything else. I grew up amongst car bombs and lynch mobs and find it so pathetic the way we are now being force fed the American experience as if “terror” began on the 11 September in New York City … I think that your show needs at least one work that is really about war and about the brutal realities of war and terror rather than something you experience from your sofa whilst flipping channels on your plasma screen television”.

EXPLORE

• notions of the reality of danger, violence and destruction in this work;
• the difference between the types of images we are accustomed to seeing in the media and the images that Geers presents in his work.

ADDITIONAL SOURCES OF INFORMATION

Exertier, Nicolas. Kendell Geers : Unnameable Violence. Parachute 124 (2006) : 60-74.

Kerkham, Ruth. There’s a Bomb in this Exhibition : Kendell Geers Charged. Parachute 99 (2000) : 30-40.

van der Watt, Lise. Witnesing Trauma in Post-Apartheid South Africa : The Question of Generational Responsibility. African Arts 38 (2005) : 26-35, 93.

Johan Grimonprez was born in Roeselare, Belgium, in 1962. He received his MFA from the School of Visual Arts, New York, and attended the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program. His 1997 video Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y received the Best Director award at both the San Francisco Film Festival and Toronto’s Images Festival. The film premiered at the Centre Pompidou, Paris, and at Documenta X, Kassel, and since then has been toured worldwide. Grimonprez has exhibited his work at institutions such as Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich; the Santa Monica Museum of Art; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the XXIV São Paulo Biennial; and the Tate Modern, London. Johan Grimonprez was the recipient of the Carnegie Art Award in 2006. He currently lives and works in Belgium and New York.

THE WORK

Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y, 1997, 1 hr, 8 min.
Video projection

Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y is a film presented in the form of a video projection installation. The visual thread of the film is a chronology of airplane highjackings of the 1960s and 1970s. A fictive narrative produced from two Don DeLillo novels—White Noise and Mao II— accompanies the imagery. Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y blends photographic, electronic, and digital images, interspersing reportage shots, clips from science fiction films, found footage, and reconstituted scenes filmed by the artist. The work, for Grimonprez, “highlights the value of the spectacular in our catastrophe culture”, denounces the media spectacle and seeks to detect the impact of images on knowledge and memory. Created years before 9/11, the film is prescient in terms of how post-911 media representation of ‘terror’ has been circulated and ‘advanced’, although ultimately relying upon the same fears and desires a 1970s audience might have had.

EXPLORE

• various ways in which this work activates memory and fantasy through its use of imagery;
• the notion of the viewer as an active or passive consumer of images.

ADDITIONAL SOURCES OF INFORMATION

Grimonprez, Johan. Inflight Magazine. Stuttgart : Hatje Cantz, 2000.

Obrist, Hans Ulrich, Vrääth Öhner, and Slavoj Zizek. Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y. Stuttgart : Hatje Cantz, 2003.

Jamelie Hassan is a visual artist based in London, Canada. Over the past three decades she has created a body of work that is intensely driven by international issues in politics and culture. Hassan is also a writer, lecturer, and independent curator and has travelled and worked within Canada and internationally. In 2001 she received a Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts and in 2006 she received the Chalmers Art Fellowship. Her work can be found in numerous public collections, including that of the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto; The University of Western Ontario, London; and the Bibliotheca Alexandrina, Alexandria.

THE WORK

Because … there was and there wasn’t a city of Baghdad, 1991
Digital print on adhesive vinyl

Because . . . there was and there wasn’t a city of Baghdad, a billboard project, is based on a photograph Hassan took in 1978 of the Haydar Khanah mosque in Baghdad, built in the nineteenth century on the Eastern Bank of the Tigris. For the artist, the billboard was part-protest against the Gulf War and part-memorial for a ruined city. This piece was exhibited within six months of the war as a billboard in Windsor, and then later London and Vancouver. While more than a decade has passed since the Gulf War, Hassan’s billboard retains currency in the contemporary world, especially in relation to the current conflict in Iraq. The billboard’s ‘gleaming’, almost Hollywood, dream-like aesthetic – a clear parody of advertising – also speaks to the delusory Orientalist spectacle of the Middle East depicted to western audiences, as it has in different formats (and for different purposes) for centuries.

EXPLORE

• the image presented in this work and the types of media representation it alludes to;
• the suggested juxtaposition of this dreamlike and aesthetic image with the more common images of war-torn Baghdad that we are currently familiar with.

ADDITIONAL SOURCES OF INFORMATION

Deith, Esther. The Art of Jamelie Hassan. Matriart 4.2 (1994) : 6-11.

Folch-Serra, Mireya. Geography, Diaspora and the Art of Dialogism : Jamelie Hassan. Parachute 90 (1998) : 10-17.

Hassan, Jamelie. Boomerang Effect. Fuse 24.2 (2001) : 47-48.

Kristan Horton was born in Niagara Falls in 1971, and lives and works in Toronto. His work is inspired by popular culture, particularly film. He studied at the University of Guelph and the Ontario College of Art and Design, and has exhibited internationally since the late nineties. He has shown his work at Glassbox, Paris; ZKM, Karlsruhe; Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki; and InterCommunication Center, Tokyo. Horton’s work has been shown in Toronto at Art Metropole as well as at Wynick/Tuck Gallery, Diaz Contemporary, Jessica Bradley Art + Projects, the Power Plant, YYZ Artists’ Outlet, and Mercer Union. Horton has been featured by Marco Deseriis in La Repubblica delle Donne, by Ian Carr-Harris in Contemporary Magazine, and Yam Lau in C Magazine, as well as been reviewed in Border Crossings, Canadian Art, and i.

THE WORK

Kristan Horton’s obsessive illustrations arise from listening to the audio book of John Keegan’s The First World War (1998). The Great War is translated through a swirling, dizzying depiction of somber narrations, where viewers encounter an industrial nightmare evolving through a narrative within an unfolding coil. Employing a tragic grandeur associable with Keegan’s text, these drawings suggest awesome inevitability as they depict interrelations of international states and their struggles for power, dramatic economic shifts, rational and irrational human judgment, and intercontinental policies both outdated and modishly well-intentioned. Destruction and catastrophe are contained within the spiral, but the mad whirl of activity speaks to perpetuity and posterity simultaneously without freezing either in overzealous, moralistic historicization. Overall, the soldier’s body is represented here as restricted to functions of life and death given the pronouncements of political and military apparatuses. From a humanist perspective, it is clear that war here is a civil war of classes orchestrated by powers that be, where the body is driven against other bodies and machines with incredible violence to subdue and divert its own political potential.

Drawing of A History of the First World War (Disc 01), 2008

Drawing of A History of the First World War (Disc 02), 2008
Graphite on paper

Drawing of A History of the First World War (Disc 03), 2008
Graphite on paper

Special thanks to Jessica Bradley.

EXPLORE

• the use of the spiral and the ways in which narrative is examined in this work;
• how does the imagery employed in this work address our perception of war.

ADDITIONAL SOURCES OF INFORMATION

Carr-Harris, Ian. Kristan Horton. Contemporary (2006) : 66-67.

Horton, Kristan. Dr Strangelove Dr. Strangelove Kristan Horton. Toronto : Art Gallery of York University, 2007.

Lau, Yam. Kristan Horton : An Image of Sculpture. C Magazine 91 (2006) : 36-38.

Abdel-Karim Khalil was born in Baghdad in 1960 and studied sculpture at Baghdad’s College of Fine Arts in 1987. Khalil’s work has been presented in a number of exhibitions including the solo shows Excruciating on Clay, Madarat Gallery, Baghdad (2007) and Sufferings on the Marble, Baghdad Gallery (1996). He has exhibited his work extensively in Iraq and also in Italy, Jordan, Lebanon, France, Tunisia, and Dubai. His work will be featured in a group exhibition at the UNESCO World Heritage Centre in Paris in 2008. Khalil currently lives and works in Baghdad.

THE WORK

Untitled, 2004

Abdel-Karim Khalil’s marble figure depicts what is presumably a hooded detainee from the Abu Ghraib prison, where the United States torture scandal in Baghdad took place. By combining a classical style of sculpture with this highly-recognizable, contentious image of tortured prisoners, Khalil’s sculpture makes comments on representations of the Iraqi people and nation, especially as they arise from the west. This sculpture also speaks to the more persistent, global use of the state of exception, which inevitably categorizes human bodies into different value systems through its self-determined use of law. Text in Arabic on the bottom of the sculpture reads, “We are living the American democracy”.

EXPLORE

• the importance of medium and the ways in which this work raises questions about how art can or does mediate images of war;
• the notion of representation, both cultural and political, in the context of this work.

ADDITIONAL SOURCES OF INFORMATION

Appel, Dora. Torture Culture : Lynching Photographs and the Images of Abu Ghraib. Art Journal 54.2 (2005) : 88-100.

Annie MacDonell was born in Windsor in 1976. She studied film and photography at Ryerson University in Toronto, followed by an MFA at Le Fresnoy Studio National des Arts Contemporains in Turcoing. Since then she has been making film, photography, collage, and installation in equal parts. Recent activities include a solo show of new installation work at Gallery TPW in Toronto and group shows at the Warehouse Gallery in Syracuse and the Foreman Art Gallery of Bishop’s University in Lennoxville.

THE WORK

A Short History of Conscription in Canada; in the words of politicians, newspapermen, ministers and university presidents, 2008

A Short History questions Canada’s conflicted attitude towards the military through an examination of the issue of conscription. The speakers play voices reciting historical texts ranging from draft speeches, personal correspondences, newspaper articles and political tracts from around and between the two world wars. Mackenzie King, Henri Bourassa, J.S. Woodsworth all weigh in on the issue in statements ranging from the radical to the purely bureaucratic. The texts are recited by current University of Toronto and Concordia University students . Their participation in the project activates the past and speaks to how Canadian identity, sovereignty and international politics may be defined today, both within the current context of global war.

EXPLORE

• the effects of reactivating historical texts in this work;
• the significance of the use of student voices.

ADDITIONAL SOURCES OF INFORMATION

Annie MacDonell, official Web site, anniemacdonell.ca

Anri Sala was born in Tirana, Albania, in 1974. He holds an MFA from the École Nationale Supérieure des Arts Decoratifs in Paris and a post-graduate degree in film direction from the Studio National des Arts Contemporains in Tourcoing. Through politically and socially charged video installations, his work presents unions between the personal and historical while, for example, expressing the political realities of past conflicts in the former Yugoslavia. Sala has had solo shows at the Dallas Museum of Art (2002); the Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna (2003); the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris (2004); and the Art Institute of Chicago (2004), and has participated in group shows including the Venice Biennale (1999, 2001, and 2003); Manifesta (2000 and 2002); the Berlin Biennale (2001); the São Paulo Biennial (2002), and the Istanbul Biennial (2003). He has received awards at the EntreVues Film Festival, Belfort (1998); the International Documentary Film Festival, Santiago de Compostela (1999); and the Williamsburg Brooklyn Film Festival (2000), as well the Silver Prize at the New York Expo of Short Film and Video (1999), the Prix Gilles Dusein (2000), and the Young Artist Prize at the Venice Biennale (2001).

THE WORK

Naturalmystic (tomahawk #2), 2002, 2 min., 8 sec.
Video projection

Naturalmystic (Tomahawk #2) presents footage of a person mimicking the sound of Tomahawk missiles in flight and their subsequent explosions in the distance. The protagonist shown in the recording studio is a man who was living in Belgrade at the time of the aggressive NATO bombardment of Yugoslavia in 1999. Sala’s work examines the repercussions of harrowing experiences on people’s lives after the events have taken place. His work presents a union between the personal and historical, while expressing the political realities of past conflicts in the former Yugoslavia.

EXPLORE

• the ways in which one’s understanding of representations of war are reframed in Naturalmystic (Tomahawk #2);
• how history, biography and personal experience become important factors in this work.

ADDITIONAL SOURCES OF INFORMATION

Enwezor, Okwi. Archive Fever : Uses of the Document in Contemporary Art. New York : International Center of Photography ; Göttingen : Steidl Publishres, 2008.

Gioni, Massimiliano, and Michele Robecchi. Anri Sala : Unfinished Histories. Flash Art 219 (2001) : 104-107.

Godfrey, Mark, Hans-Ulrich Obrist, and Liam Gillick. Anri Sala. London and New York : Phaidon Press, 2006.

Sonja Savić was born in Čačak, Yugoslavia in 1961. As a Serbian actress famous for her husky voice, she appeared in impressive roles in more than eighty films from the former Yugoslavia. She has acted in more than eighty films including Balkanska perestrojka (1990), Kako je propao rokenrol (The Fall of Rock and Roll) (1989), and Crna Marija (Black Maria) (1986). Savić continues to perform in film and theatre productions, but has also written and directed various film, video, and theatre projects known for their unusual experimental style and character, including versions of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. In 1985 she won a “Special Mention” award at the Venice Film Festival for her role in Zivot je lep. In 2001, she won Best Supporting Actor at the Slovenian Film Festival for her role in Kruh in mleko (Bread and Milk). In 2005, she was part of a retrospective exhibition of “anti-regime art” from the nineties at the Museum of Contemporary Art Belgrade. Sonja Savić lives and works in Belgrade.

THE WORK

Play, 1998, 21 min.
Video

Made on the eve of NATO’s invasion of Yugoslavia, Play presents a visual history of Yugoslavia culminating with the nineties war when the nation’s breakup was near complete. A black-humoured cultural analysis speaking to the region’s tragic history, the video also references the “golden age” of Yugoslavia, including a 1976 visit by theatre director Robert Wilson. Nostalgic for a lost, internationalist culture, the video outlines how a culture copes within total war while being represented as a primitive aggressor abroad. Through a barrage of often incongruent, disturbing images, the cultural, political, and economic isolation of Yugoslavia and its citizens is detailed. A great, unraveling force beyond the will and political scope of the nation is inferred by unsophisticated depictions of Marx’s head emerging from a toilet, or the Acephale (a headless body) tossing its skeleton head amid references to the NATO invasion, the exodus of millions, and the harsh sanctions and state of war creating unimaginable conditions.

Two women sit in a bar, drinking beer and waxing on the meaning of life under war. Likewise, images of Miomir, the blind radio DJ for Belgrade’s B92 station, include him describing his show as “the mirror of shit town,” displaying deep cynicism and perseverance in the face of adversity, where the city’s culture is “the ugly, the filthy and the evil.” As the women finish their beer, they toss postcards (depicting riots and despair) onto the table and eat McDonald’s sundays. Their zealous consumption of the ice cream speaks to a kind of vampirism within catastrophe. Through over-fulfillment of the west’s imagining of the east – Savić’s merciless and pertinacious account depicts a class of resistance — demoralized, sickly artists, underfed working class, children bombarded by television montage, all raised in a time of war and its propaganda.

EXPLORE

• the ways in which images, reality, narrative, and fiction interact in Play;
• the vision of conflict depicted in this work.

Sean Snyder was born in Virginia Beach, United States, in 1972, and lives and works in Berlin and Kiev. His recent work stems from research into the representation of war. Snyder investigates processes of photojournalism and the lexicon of international brands featured by the western press in their images of war. Snyder’s work does not take an overt political stance on the material, but rather questions the nature of reporting. Snyder completed his studies at the Staedelschule, Frankfurt am Main and his work has been included in the 9th Istanbul Biennial (2005); InSITE at San Diego Museum of Art/Centro Cultural Tijuana (2005); Living Inside the Grid at the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York (2003); and Manifesta 2, Luxembourg (1998).

THE WORK

Casio, Seiko, Sheraton, Toyota, Mars, 2004-2005, 13 min., 11 sec.
Single channel video

In this video essay, Sean Snyder strings together images culled from government, amateur, and photojournalist sources and overlays them with a critical commentary. By tracking the conventions and techniques of photojournalism, Snyder’s piece sheds light on decades of foreign corporate involvement and influence on Iraq and Afghanistan. The repeated appearance of products, such as Mars candy bars, Toyota trucks, and Casio watches, exposes the capacity of media images to serve as accidental — or perhaps purposeful — product placements.

EXPLORE

• visual strategies employed in Casio, Seiko, Sheraton, Toyota, Mars;
• the relationship that is established between goods and images and what that tells you.

ADDITIONAL SOURCES OF INFORMATION

Potrc, Marjetica. Sean Snyder : Dueks Gambling & Cultural Bankruptcy or, the Bastardised Urban Landscape. Afterall 6 (2002) : 88-91.

Verwoeth, Jan. Sean Snyder : Jump Cut Cities. Afterall 6 (2002) : 72-81.

Woznicki, Krystian. Sean Snyder Image Problem City. On the Archival Photographic Projects of Sean Snyder. Camera Austria 70 (2000) : 41-52.

Ron Terada was born in Vancouver in 1969. He studied at the Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design, the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, and the University of British Columbia. Recent solo exhibitions have been held at Ikon, Birmingham (2006); the Art Gallery of Windsor (2005); and the Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver (2003). Recent group exhibitions include the touring exhibition Baja to Vancouver: The West Coast and Contemporary Art, organized by the CCA Wattis Institute, San Francisco (2004); the 6th Shanghai Biennale (2006); Intertidal: Vancouver Art and Artists, Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst Antwerpen, Belgium (2005); General Ideas: Rethinking Conceptual Art 1990–2005, CCA Wattis Institute, San Francisco (2005); Words Fail Me, Museum of Contemporary Art, Detroit (2007); For Sale, Cristina Guerra Contemporary Art, Lisbon (2007); The Idea of North, Isabella Bortolozzi Galerie, Berlin (2007); Without, Yvon Lambert, Paris (2007); and Sobey Art Award, Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, Halifax (2007). In 2006, Terada received a Canada Council for the Arts Victor Martyn Lynch-Staunton Award.

THE WORK

You have left the American sector/Vous êtes sortis du secteur américan, 2005
Exterior vinyl on extruded aluminum, steel, wood, paint.

On September 28, 2005, municipal workers in Windsor removed Terada’s sign You have left the American sector/Vous êtes sortis du secteur américan from public view after its six-day display near the busy Detroit-Windsor border. Mimicking government highway signage, the work firstly recalls Checkpoint Charlie, the notorious border crossing in Berlin that symbolized the height of the Cold War (and is now a tourist site), and makes reference to sometimes tense border relations and different sovereign ideas on state security between Canada and the United States. Neither the artist nor the Art Gallery of Windsor, who commissioned the sign, were consulted regarding the sign’s removal, apparently in response to complaints from business owners who feared a hostile American reaction. Ironically, Terada had relinquished the project’s authorship to the city and responsibility for the work’s reception was held by its approval body.

As with his previous work, You have left the American sector/Vous êtes sortis du secteur américan engages with the use-value and meaning of signage in public space and with the apparent insignificance of art amidst the spectacle and control of late capitalism. Terada’s signs have also been described as intentionally exemplifying and underlining his work’s complicity with the structures of the art institution, which itself cannot easily fulfill its often vanguardist mission of withdrawing from or resisting the trappings of late capitalist culture.

EXPLORE

• the ways in which You Have Left the American Sector/Vous êtes sortis du secteur américain addresses geopolitical and idealogical boundaries
• context and what happens to this work when it is exhibited outside its intended context.

ADDITIONAL SOURCES OF INFORMATION

Larson, Cliff. Ron Terada. Contemporary Magazine 85 (2006) : 93-95.

Rodney, Lee. Have You Left the American Sector? : Ron Terada’s Adventure in the City of Roses. Fuse 29.2 (2006) : 8-12.

Sheir, Reid. Ron Terada. Vancouver : Contemporary Art Gallery, 2004.

Groys, Boris, Séamus Kealy, Gene Ray, and Brigitte van der Sande. Signals in the Dark : Art in the Shadow of War. Mississauga/Toronto: Blackwood Gallery/Justina M. Barnicke Gallery, 2008.