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Predatory eyes
Following from my last post on the art of bombing – on artists who have attempted to render the aerial perspective of conventional bombing – Honor Harger (from Lighthouse) provides a useful review of...
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After Hiroshima
Following my post on artists and bombing, and in particular the work of elin o’Hara slavick, elin has written with news of her new book, After Hiroshima, due in March from Daylight, with what she calls...
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The Freestone Drone
Visual and media artists continue to dazzle with their interventions on the drone wars. Pierre d’Alancaisez of waterside contemporary in London has written with news of a forthcoming video...
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Gaza in Ruins
An important post from Craig Jones about the capacity of the creative arts to respond to and even dislocate military violence that chimes beautifully with my previous post about War/Photography, and...
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‘A foreign field that is forever England’?
I’ve already noted the effect that William Boyd‘s An Ice-Cream War (1982) had on me, but there’s another Boyd novel that also deals with the First World War – this time set on the Western Front rather...
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Hide and Seek – and Show
Ever since I heard Isla Forsyth give one of her marvellous presentations on camouflage I’ve been fascinated by the subject – all the more so since it intersects so artfully (and, as Isla would quite...
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Geographies of War: Iraq revisited
As we approach the anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, British Foreign Secretary William Hague has reportedly advised his coalition colleagues not to discuss the war… Fortunately we have people like...
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Imaging war, mediating conflict
Last weekend Media@McGill, in collaboration with DHC/ART Foundation for Contemporary Art, hosted a screening and conference on representations of war and conflict in art and art history (I’m grateful...
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Drone imaginaries
While everyone’s attention this week seems to have been captured by Pitch Interactive’s remarkable graphic of US drone strikes in Pakistan, Out of sight, Out of mind, Elspeth Van Veeren provides a...
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Dronesong
‘In 1990,’ Palestinian pop-artist Laila Shawa recalls, ‘I had breast cancer.’ While undergoing radiotherapy, I watched on television the precision bombing of Baghdad by US airplanes, forever linking...
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Where Souls Dwell
I’ve had a message from Laila Shawa, whose work I noted earlier, enclosing one of her latest projects (and generously allowing me to show her work here). Where Souls Dwell (above) is from her Gun...
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Situational awareness
Two art projects from Lighthouse at the Brighton Festival in the UK this month (4-26 May); thanks to Sam Hind for the information. James Bridle‘s work will be familiar to most readers, and in Brighton...
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War tourism
I spent part of the week-end at UBC’s Museum of Anthropology, which is currently hosting Safar/Voyage: contemporary works by Arab, Iranian and Turkish artists (until 15 September). I’d written an...
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Drones and the Quiet Americans
Following on from the Coded Conduct exhibition in London in April, James Bridle’s new work A Quiet Disposition opens at the Corcoran in Washington DC later this month, running from 19 June to 7 July....
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Drones.
The Center for the Study of the Drone at Bard College has just posted video of a performance work “Drones.” developed by undergraduates at the College in March this year. The Center was established in...
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Black spots and blank spots
Over at Guernica, Trevor Paglen has a short essay on the rise of what he calls ‘the terror state’ that connects the dots between several recent posts: For more than a decade, we’ve seen the rise of...
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Safe bombs and refusing pilots
My first attempt to think through the histories and geographies of bombing from the air was, appropriately enough, a plenary address to the Arab World Geographer conference in Beirut in 2006 – a...
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Amnesia and acts of killing
I’ve discussed Joshua Oppenheimer‘s The Act of Killing – about paramilitary death-squads in Indonesia in 1965-6 – in an earlier post. Larry Rohter provided a short backgrounder in the New York Times...
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Militarized vision
Before I started my odyssey through Grégoire Chamayou‘s Théorie du drone (which will continue next week), I had discussed multiple ways of thinking about the relations between visualities, political...
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When war comes home
After the US invasion of Iraq there were all sorts of artistic interventions that sought to bring home to Americans what was happening in Baghdad. I described some of them in ‘War and peace’...
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