MyWar

Blog!, participate! and share! are the battle cries of a media culture in which the boundaries between private and public, between personal and political have been decisively eroded. The exhibition MyWar: Identity and Appropriation Under War Condition pinpoints the moral implications of wars when they are experienced through media. This intervention is delineated by a media landscape where web 2.0 tools are consistently altering the way that audiences and users both consume, and exchange information.

The exhibition follows two separate threads. In the first of these, the artists adopt a radically individualistic approach to war. Renzo Martens turns the camera, amidst a war zone, onto himself. Sarah Vanagt highlights the activities of young people, revealing the mundane aspects of everyday life that blogging culture is obsessed with. Harrell Fletcher makes children renarrate adults´ war memories. With the documentation of her own re-enactments of scenes and sites of the 1940s partisan war Milica Tomic asks whether the appropriation of such events is possible. SWAMP constructed a device that inflicts pain on its wearer with every soldier’s death in Iraq. Dunne & Raby´s (ironic) plush version of the mushroom cloud is conceived to be a therapeutic object for people with special fears of a nuclear war.

In the second thread of the exhibition, artists directly engage with the way in which web technologies have infiltrated and influenced global wars. Joseph DeLappe uses an online recruiting game of the American army to write down the names of killed American soldiers in Iraq. Thompson & Craighead construct a global narrative of an ubiquitous war from blog information. Oliver Laric shows airbrush variations of a manipulated Iranian image of rocket launches which was widely faked and ridiculed on the internet. Knowbotic Research offer a fictional ending to a moving YouTube-circulated news story, where a young Palestinian boy turns into a Transformer-like robot. Harun Farocki addresses the question of computer-aided trauma therapy for war veterans.