woocommerce-shipping-per-product domain was triggered too early. This is usually an indicator for some code in the plugin or theme running too early. Translations should be loaded at the init action or later. Please see Debugging in WordPress for more information. (This message was added in version 6.7.0.) in /var/www/staging.esse.ca/htdocs/wp-includes/functions.php on line 6131complianz-gdpr domain was triggered too early. This is usually an indicator for some code in the plugin or theme running too early. Translations should be loaded at the init action or later. Please see Debugging in WordPress for more information. (This message was added in version 6.7.0.) in /var/www/staging.esse.ca/htdocs/wp-includes/functions.php on line 6131\nFor this group exhibition, curator John Zeppetelli seems to have posed himself an impossible challenge: to bring together artworks that make disappearance visually representable and absence physically palpable. Chronicles of a Disappearance<\/em> is a quiet but unnerving overview of five artists\u2019 strategies for depicting the distant and invisible nature of violence in contemporary politics.<\/pre>\n\n\n\nTexts, and their translations, serve to explicate the social context of many of the projects, but also underscore the incommensurable distance (physical, historical, and cultural) between the artworks\u2019 absented subjects and their present viewers. In Taryn Simon\u2019s 2007 series, An American Index of the Hidden and the Unfamiliar<\/em>, large-scale colour photographs offer glimpses of concealed locations in the American landscape, from the banal (such as the abstract art collection that hangs in the lobby of the CIA\u2019s headquarters) to the shocking (like the ungainly pile of all the items confiscated from passengers over a 24-hour period at New York\u2019s John F. Kennedy airport). Though the photographs are surreal records of places viewers could not otherwise imagine, it is Simon\u2019s dry descriptions of what takes place in these scenes\u200a\u2014\u200aprinted in tiny type on the wall next to each image\u200a\u2014\u200athat give the work its political force, raising questions about why these activities remain unseen in an age of ubiquitous photo documentation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Omer Fast\u2019s film installation, 5000 Feet is the Best<\/em> (2011), also employs translation to comment on secretive forms of international surveillance, and professional actors to recreate military missions in Pakistan and Afghanistan conducted by a drone operator in the United States. Drawing on the tropes of action films and video games, Fast uses subtitles and a voice-over to describe the attacks, but sets the film in the desert landscape around Las Vegas, applying his unique talent for layering multiple cinematic narratives to confuse fact and fiction, literally bringing home the human cost of these acts of overseas violence.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In the most disturbing work in the exhibition, text bridges the extremes of abstraction and figuration wrought by death. At first glance, Teresa Margolles\u2019s Plancha<\/em> (2010) resembles a Carl Andre\u200a\u2013\u200ainspired minimalist sculpture, a series of steel plates in a line along the gallery floor. Occasional drips of water from the ceiling activate the object, however, hissing as they hit the heated plates and are transformed into steam. Zeppetelli\u2019s didactic text reveals that the water is in fact taken from a morgue in Mexico City after it is used to wash corpses, charging this otherwise simple material transformation with metaphysical implications. Seen alongside video projects by Philippe Parreno and Jos\u00e9 Toirac that memorialize political figures, these works imbue the act of disappearance with an aspect of the sublime, questioning the very limits of visual representation.<\/p>\n