This idea of artists being influenced by images of war shown on TV still resonates in contemporary art practices, despite the proliferation of new media sources. Even though the way that such images are captured and produced has changed over time, in part due to new information-dissemination platforms, it is how the images are presented, framed, and interpreted that distinguishes the work of artists from that of image makers\u200a\u2014\u200ajournalists, camera operators, photographers\u200a\u2014\u200ain the field. And, correlatively, what if the production and dissemination of wartime images influenced the materials used by artists exploring these wars? The stance of contemporary artists who use the same visual materials as diverse channels for communicating information on wars is rooted in an approach critical of image production and delivery modes, albeit from a perspective that critiques and analyzes documentary forms. These artists position themselves as image makers in the same way as journalists do, but their role in the creation of visual narratives differs. By adopting strategies such as reconstruction, the use of archival resources, or the visualization of collective narratives\u200a\u2014\u200astrategies that capture both the impact and consequences of conflicts\u200a\u2014\u200aartists inhabit a territory complementary to that of journalists.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Leila Zelli
<\/strong>Leila Zelli. Terrain de jeux<\/em>, exhibition details,
Galerie de l\u2019UQAM, Montr\u00e9al, 2019.
Photos : Galerie de l\u2019UQAM<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
\n
<\/div>\n\n\n\n
\n
$\"\"$
Leila Zelli
<\/strong>Leila Zelli. Terrain de jeux<\/em>, exhibition details,
Galerie de l\u2019UQAM, Montr\u00e9al, 2019.
Photos : Galerie de l\u2019UQAM<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
The role of news media in the instant dissemination of war images and the influence that these representations have on contemporary artistic creation, notably in the choice of materials used by artists to address conflicts, are clearly manifest in certain works by Aernout Mik, Omer Fast, Rabih Mrou\u00e9, and Leila Zelli. The difference between the artist\u2019s approach, subjective and aesthetic, and the journalist\u2019s, focusing more on evidence and inquiry, clearly reveals a certain formal commonality but also a critical detachment in terms of scope.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Historically, media coverage of the First and Second World Wars, based largely on photographic and textual accounts, gave way to images captured on film. The Vietnam War was the first TV war, but it was only with the Gulf War (1990\u201391) that instant representations of conflict emerged. In the 1990s and early 2000s, the mass media developed all-news channels, establishing their twenty-four-hour \u201clive\u201d media arsenal. Despite the repeated and sensationalist broadcast of certain images on TV screens, the accounts of news anchors and journalists are nevertheless often dictated by political and military interests, as was the case in media coverage of the Gulf \u200aWar. This conflict marked not only the beginnings of information manipulation but also of a transformation of the real through live coverage in which the narrative is controlled by the military. Playing on what, in essence, is fake objectivity, this control of information modifies the role of images received by a remote public.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
\n
$\"\"$ <\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
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$\"\"$ <\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
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$\"\"$ <\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
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\n
$\"\"$ <\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
\n
$\"\"$
Omer Fast<\/strong>
CNN Concatenated<\/em>, captures vid\u00e9os | video stills, 2002.
Photos : permission de | courtesy of the artist
& gb agency, Paris<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
\n
$\"\"$ <\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
In this vein, Aernout Mik\u2019s video installation Raw Footage <\/em>(2006) questions the manipulation of journalistic accounts. The work comprises a montage of TV sequences filmed during the civil war in former Yugoslavia\u200a\u2014\u200asequences that were rejected by press agencies due to their lack of journalistic or sensationalist value for live broadcasting. Mundane yet shocking, the footage assembled by Mik bears testimony to the chilling realities of war through non-\u00admanipulated images, as the title of the work suggests. Soldiers and civilians cross paths. The gunfire and artillery exchanges punctuating the video are the soundtrack to these ordinary people\u2019s everyday lives. Initially filmed for TV, the images, without commentary or narrative structure, offer a rhythmic collection of war images as experienced on a day-to-day basis by the citizens of former Yugoslavia. By using these unbroadcast clips, Mik restores the material and its contents, playing on the meaning of the decontextualized images while modifying how they are perceived and understood by the public.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
<\/div>\n\n\n\n
<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
\n
\n
$\"\"$
Omer Fast<\/strong>
CNN Concatenated<\/em>, video stills, 2002.
Photo : courtesy of the artist & gb agency, Paris<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
\n
The method used by Omer Fast to retrieve media images used in the video CNN Concatenated<\/em> (2002) also comprises a collage of sorts\u200a\u2014\u200athis time, in the form of visual and audio excerpts from newscasts following September 11, 2001. Thousands of very short clips of anchors, guest commentators, and journalists in the field are spliced together to create seven monologues that address the viewer directly, offering a satirical take on televised newscasts. By generating a new narrative and revealing the mutability of information and language, Fast invites the audience to question media neutrality and authority. The work addresses how discourse and images are received by the viewer, and, more specifically, how live news and the language of fear often used in such reporting emotively manipulate the viewer.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In Regarding the Pain of Others<\/em>, Susan Sontag effectively summarized this idea that the repeated dissemination of war images on viewers\u2019 screens establishes a distance between reality and the corresponding media discourse: \u201cCreating a perch for a particular conflict in the consciousness of viewers exposed to dramas from everywhere requires the daily diffusion and rediffusion of snippets of footage about the conflict. The understanding of war among people who have not experienced war is now chiefly a product of these images.\u201d^{2<\/sup><\/a><\/span>} 2 <\/a> - Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others<\/em> (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003), 21.<\/span> In their own ways, Mik and Fast reappropriate televisual techniques with the aim of creating new forms of visual narrative, offering a reconfiguration of space-time by distorting media discourse. By using snippets of footage or segments rejected for televised newscasts, both artists add an additional layer of readability to already existing images.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
*<\/p>\n\n\n\n*
Given the increasing importance of search engines and social networks as primary sources of information, newscasts are gradually being abandoned in favour of targeted online searches for images of specific conflicts. Often anonymous or unauthenticated, these depictions of war\u200a\u2014\u200ashot on cellphones rather than TV cam\u00aderas\u200a\u2014\u200aare slowly replacing traditional media images, in a form of citizen journalism that legitimizes everyone to document and disseminate information on a given conflict. This new wave of image making and sharing is also influencing art practice.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In 2011, Rabih Mrou\u00e9 created a series of works that directly address the role of cellphone images in the Syrian revolution. Rather than offering objective explanations of the conflict, Mrou\u00e9 opted for an extreme deconstruction of the documentary image, confronting the viewer with the paradoxical impossibility of \u201cseeing\u201d everything. The Pixelated Revolution<\/em> is a lecture-performance. Seated at a table with a small lamp and laptop, Mrou\u00e9 addresses the public directly. He explains how everything began during a conversation in which a friend claimed that Syrian protestors were filming their own deaths, offering as example a video showing a protestor pointing his camera at a sniper who would then shoot him. He thus questions the protestors\u2019 motives for documenting their own deaths while fighting for their lives. In reality, while Mrou\u00e9 was filming, the Syrian protestors were only trying to record what was happening\u200a\u2014\u200athe death came about accidentally. He reflects on these new kinds of images of historical events and questions their production as a stratagem within a collective crusade, the ongoing Syrian revolution. This work addresses a major paradigm shift in how images are disseminated, how conflicts are made visible, and how new, highly subjective narrative forms are introduced. Geopolitical questions seem of secondary importance in the piece; it\u2019s the agency of the images in times of war\u200a\u2014\u200aespecially their function as purveyors of reality\u200a\u2014\u200athat is key here. The project coincided with the start of the Syrian revolution, in the context of the Arab Spring and its fight for democracy and against the Bachar el-Assad regime, at a time when the Syrian government had opted for a media blackout and forbidden foreign journalists and citizens from entering the country. The only two ways to know what was happening in Syria at the time were through state-driven news channels, whose reporting verged on propaganda, and the images captured and posted on the Internet by the protestors themselves. These images form the basis of *The Pixelated Revolution.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n*
\n
<\/div>\n\n\n\n
\n
$\"\"$
Rabih Mrou\u00e9<\/strong>
The Pixelated Revolution<\/em>, video stills, 2012.
Photos : courtesy of the artist & Sfeir-Semler Gallery, Beirut\/Hamburg<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
\n
\n
$\"\"$
Rabih Mrou\u00e9
<\/strong>The Pixelated Revolution<\/em>, video stills, 2012.
Photos : courtesy of the artist & Sfeir-Semler Gallery, Beirut\/Hamburg<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
\n
<\/div>\n\n\n\n
\n
$\"\"$
Rabih Mrou\u00e9
<\/strong>The Pixelated Revolution<\/em>, video stills, 2012.
Photos : courtesy of the artist & Sfeir-Semler Gallery, Beirut\/Hamburg<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
Following this targeted use of images of war and conflict gleaned from the Internet, in the installation Terrain de jeux<\/em> (2019), artist Leila Zelli uses images from the Web to place children\u2019s real games and political games with images in context. The garnered images form the basis of an installation that raises questions about what is going on off-camera or outside the frame; this is achieved through a unique use of gallery space. Terrain de jeux is composed of three elements. Central to the piece is a video showing large swathes of black fabric peppered with holes flapping in the wind, hung against a wire fence in rocky terrain; a soundtrack of children playing outdoors sets the tone. The holes in the fabric in the video are literally echoed in the holes drilled into the adjoining wall of the gallery. Through each of the dozen or so holes, visitors can observe short videos that capture simple everyday moments, some of which may seem insignificant whereas others clearly bear traces of war. In a small adjacent room, another video completes the work. Spanning the top of the wall like a large inaccessible window, a video, with a soundtrack of children playing outdoors, shows a section of cloudy blue sky punctuated intermittently by a ball sailing in and out of view. Projected successively at the bottom of the same wall are the following phrases: \u201cWe\u2019ve been here for eight months,\u201d \u201cI\u2019ve befriended some girls here and now we play football together,\u201d \u201cI\u2019m the one who likes playing the most,\u201d \u201cIt\u2019s undignified for a girl to play outdoors,\u201d \u201cI only started playing here,\u201d and \u201cI\u2019m allowed to play here because we\u2019re away from the boys.\u201d Playing on these videographic components and their cleverly orchestrated spatial arrangement, Zelli controls what can be seen while challenging the viewer\u2019s sometimes problematic curiosity about this type of imagery. She shows that images of war are always fragmentary and subjective, mere traces and snippets of a greater reality. Life goes on and the everyday prevails: children play games, flowers grow, and electricity flickers erratically. Zelli highlights the multitude of viewpoints and the plethora of interpretations generated by representations of war, in all its horror and beauty, its contours and brutality.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The representations of conflict that fill our screens function as archives, serving, for some artists, as material for constructing new narrative forms. For others, they are systems for producing war images and information (real or fictitious) that influence how images and narratives are manufactured. The works described and analyzed here attest to a close link among art, war, and the media; or more precisely, to a material point of contact\u200a\u2014\u200athe image\u200a\u2014\u200aamong all protagonists deeply or remotely interested in war, be they journalists, news anchors, the military, viewers, or artists.
<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Translated from the French by **Louise Ashcroft<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n**
Aernout Mik, Leila Zelli, Marie-H\u00e9l\u00e8ne Leblanc, Omer Fast, Rabih Mrou\u00e9<\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In the introduction to the exhibition catalogue for A Different War (1990), curator Lucy R. Lippard states the \u00adfollowing about artists who created works during the Vietnam War: \u201cArtists were particularly \u00adsusceptible to the visual power of war images on TV. Yet only the best-informed were able to sift out the real news between the dots and [NOTE count=1]lines.\u201d[\/NOTE][REF count=1]Lucy R. Lippard, A Different War: Vietnam in Art, exhibition catalogue (Bellingham: Whatcom Museum of History and Art, Real Comet Press, 1990), 10.[\/REF]<\/br>","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":147035,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[882],"tags":[],"numeros":[2230],"disciplines":[],"statuts":[],"checklist":[],"auteurs":[1016],"artistes":[2052,2065,2044,2053],"thematiques":[],"type_post":[],"class_list":["post-147058","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-post","numeros-96-conflict","auteurs-marie-helene-leblanc-en","artistes-aernout-mik-en","artistes-leila-zelli-en","artistes-omer-fast-en","artistes-rabih-mroue-en"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/147058","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=147058"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/147058\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":273666,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/147058\/revisions\/273666"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/147035"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=147058"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=147058"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=147058"},{"taxonomy":"numeros","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/numeros?post=147058"},{"taxonomy":"disciplines","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/disciplines?post=147058"},{"taxonomy":"statuts","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/statuts?post=147058"},{"taxonomy":"checklist","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/checklist?post=147058"},{"taxonomy":"auteurs","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/auteurs?post=147058"},{"taxonomy":"artistes","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/artistes?post=147058"},{"taxonomy":"thematiques","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/thematiques?post=147058"},{"taxonomy":"type_post","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/type_post?post=147058"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}

Leila Zelli
<\/strong>Leila Zelli. Terrain de jeux<\/em>, exhibition details,
Galerie de l\u2019UQAM, Montr\u00e9al, 2019.
Photos : Galerie de l\u2019UQAM<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
\n
<\/div>\n\n\n\n
\n
$\"\"$
Leila Zelli
<\/strong>Leila Zelli. Terrain de jeux<\/em>, exhibition details,
Galerie de l\u2019UQAM, Montr\u00e9al, 2019.
Photos : Galerie de l\u2019UQAM<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
The role of news media in the instant dissemination of war images and the influence that these representations have on contemporary artistic creation, notably in the choice of materials used by artists to address conflicts, are clearly manifest in certain works by Aernout Mik, Omer Fast, Rabih Mrou\u00e9, and Leila Zelli. The difference between the artist\u2019s approach, subjective and aesthetic, and the journalist\u2019s, focusing more on evidence and inquiry, clearly reveals a certain formal commonality but also a critical detachment in terms of scope.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Historically, media coverage of the First and Second World Wars, based largely on photographic and textual accounts, gave way to images captured on film. The Vietnam War was the first TV war, but it was only with the Gulf War (1990\u201391) that instant representations of conflict emerged. In the 1990s and early 2000s, the mass media developed all-news channels, establishing their twenty-four-hour \u201clive\u201d media arsenal. Despite the repeated and sensationalist broadcast of certain images on TV screens, the accounts of news anchors and journalists are nevertheless often dictated by political and military interests, as was the case in media coverage of the Gulf \u200aWar. This conflict marked not only the beginnings of information manipulation but also of a transformation of the real through live coverage in which the narrative is controlled by the military. Playing on what, in essence, is fake objectivity, this control of information modifies the role of images received by a remote public.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
\n
$\"\"$ <\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
\n
$\"\"$ <\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
\n
$\"\"$ <\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
\n
\n
$\"\"$ <\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
\n
$\"\"$
Omer Fast<\/strong>
CNN Concatenated<\/em>, captures vid\u00e9os | video stills, 2002.
Photos : permission de | courtesy of the artist
& gb agency, Paris<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
\n
$\"\"$ <\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
In this vein, Aernout Mik\u2019s video installation Raw Footage <\/em>(2006) questions the manipulation of journalistic accounts. The work comprises a montage of TV sequences filmed during the civil war in former Yugoslavia\u200a\u2014\u200asequences that were rejected by press agencies due to their lack of journalistic or sensationalist value for live broadcasting. Mundane yet shocking, the footage assembled by Mik bears testimony to the chilling realities of war through non-\u00admanipulated images, as the title of the work suggests. Soldiers and civilians cross paths. The gunfire and artillery exchanges punctuating the video are the soundtrack to these ordinary people\u2019s everyday lives. Initially filmed for TV, the images, without commentary or narrative structure, offer a rhythmic collection of war images as experienced on a day-to-day basis by the citizens of former Yugoslavia. By using these unbroadcast clips, Mik restores the material and its contents, playing on the meaning of the decontextualized images while modifying how they are perceived and understood by the public.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
<\/div>\n\n\n\n
<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
\n
\n
$\"\"$
Omer Fast<\/strong>
CNN Concatenated<\/em>, video stills, 2002.
Photo : courtesy of the artist & gb agency, Paris<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
\n
The method used by Omer Fast to retrieve media images used in the video CNN Concatenated<\/em> (2002) also comprises a collage of sorts\u200a\u2014\u200athis time, in the form of visual and audio excerpts from newscasts following September 11, 2001. Thousands of very short clips of anchors, guest commentators, and journalists in the field are spliced together to create seven monologues that address the viewer directly, offering a satirical take on televised newscasts. By generating a new narrative and revealing the mutability of information and language, Fast invites the audience to question media neutrality and authority. The work addresses how discourse and images are received by the viewer, and, more specifically, how live news and the language of fear often used in such reporting emotively manipulate the viewer.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In Regarding the Pain of Others<\/em>, Susan Sontag effectively summarized this idea that the repeated dissemination of war images on viewers\u2019 screens establishes a distance between reality and the corresponding media discourse: \u201cCreating a perch for a particular conflict in the consciousness of viewers exposed to dramas from everywhere requires the daily diffusion and rediffusion of snippets of footage about the conflict. The understanding of war among people who have not experienced war is now chiefly a product of these images.\u201d^{2<\/sup><\/a><\/span>} 2 <\/a> - Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others<\/em> (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003), 21.<\/span> In their own ways, Mik and Fast reappropriate televisual techniques with the aim of creating new forms of visual narrative, offering a reconfiguration of space-time by distorting media discourse. By using snippets of footage or segments rejected for televised newscasts, both artists add an additional layer of readability to already existing images.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
*<\/p>\n\n\n\n*
Given the increasing importance of search engines and social networks as primary sources of information, newscasts are gradually being abandoned in favour of targeted online searches for images of specific conflicts. Often anonymous or unauthenticated, these depictions of war\u200a\u2014\u200ashot on cellphones rather than TV cam\u00aderas\u200a\u2014\u200aare slowly replacing traditional media images, in a form of citizen journalism that legitimizes everyone to document and disseminate information on a given conflict. This new wave of image making and sharing is also influencing art practice.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In 2011, Rabih Mrou\u00e9 created a series of works that directly address the role of cellphone images in the Syrian revolution. Rather than offering objective explanations of the conflict, Mrou\u00e9 opted for an extreme deconstruction of the documentary image, confronting the viewer with the paradoxical impossibility of \u201cseeing\u201d everything. The Pixelated Revolution<\/em> is a lecture-performance. Seated at a table with a small lamp and laptop, Mrou\u00e9 addresses the public directly. He explains how everything began during a conversation in which a friend claimed that Syrian protestors were filming their own deaths, offering as example a video showing a protestor pointing his camera at a sniper who would then shoot him. He thus questions the protestors\u2019 motives for documenting their own deaths while fighting for their lives. In reality, while Mrou\u00e9 was filming, the Syrian protestors were only trying to record what was happening\u200a\u2014\u200athe death came about accidentally. He reflects on these new kinds of images of historical events and questions their production as a stratagem within a collective crusade, the ongoing Syrian revolution. This work addresses a major paradigm shift in how images are disseminated, how conflicts are made visible, and how new, highly subjective narrative forms are introduced. Geopolitical questions seem of secondary importance in the piece; it\u2019s the agency of the images in times of war\u200a\u2014\u200aespecially their function as purveyors of reality\u200a\u2014\u200athat is key here. The project coincided with the start of the Syrian revolution, in the context of the Arab Spring and its fight for democracy and against the Bachar el-Assad regime, at a time when the Syrian government had opted for a media blackout and forbidden foreign journalists and citizens from entering the country. The only two ways to know what was happening in Syria at the time were through state-driven news channels, whose reporting verged on propaganda, and the images captured and posted on the Internet by the protestors themselves. These images form the basis of *The Pixelated Revolution.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n*
\n
<\/div>\n\n\n\n
\n
$\"\"$
Rabih Mrou\u00e9<\/strong>
The Pixelated Revolution<\/em>, video stills, 2012.
Photos : courtesy of the artist & Sfeir-Semler Gallery, Beirut\/Hamburg<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
\n
\n
$\"\"$
Rabih Mrou\u00e9
<\/strong>The Pixelated Revolution<\/em>, video stills, 2012.
Photos : courtesy of the artist & Sfeir-Semler Gallery, Beirut\/Hamburg<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
\n
<\/div>\n\n\n\n
\n
$\"\"$
Rabih Mrou\u00e9
<\/strong>The Pixelated Revolution<\/em>, video stills, 2012.
Photos : courtesy of the artist & Sfeir-Semler Gallery, Beirut\/Hamburg<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
Following this targeted use of images of war and conflict gleaned from the Internet, in the installation Terrain de jeux<\/em> (2019), artist Leila Zelli uses images from the Web to place children\u2019s real games and political games with images in context. The garnered images form the basis of an installation that raises questions about what is going on off-camera or outside the frame; this is achieved through a unique use of gallery space. Terrain de jeux is composed of three elements. Central to the piece is a video showing large swathes of black fabric peppered with holes flapping in the wind, hung against a wire fence in rocky terrain; a soundtrack of children playing outdoors sets the tone. The holes in the fabric in the video are literally echoed in the holes drilled into the adjoining wall of the gallery. Through each of the dozen or so holes, visitors can observe short videos that capture simple everyday moments, some of which may seem insignificant whereas others clearly bear traces of war. In a small adjacent room, another video completes the work. Spanning the top of the wall like a large inaccessible window, a video, with a soundtrack of children playing outdoors, shows a section of cloudy blue sky punctuated intermittently by a ball sailing in and out of view. Projected successively at the bottom of the same wall are the following phrases: \u201cWe\u2019ve been here for eight months,\u201d \u201cI\u2019ve befriended some girls here and now we play football together,\u201d \u201cI\u2019m the one who likes playing the most,\u201d \u201cIt\u2019s undignified for a girl to play outdoors,\u201d \u201cI only started playing here,\u201d and \u201cI\u2019m allowed to play here because we\u2019re away from the boys.\u201d Playing on these videographic components and their cleverly orchestrated spatial arrangement, Zelli controls what can be seen while challenging the viewer\u2019s sometimes problematic curiosity about this type of imagery. She shows that images of war are always fragmentary and subjective, mere traces and snippets of a greater reality. Life goes on and the everyday prevails: children play games, flowers grow, and electricity flickers erratically. Zelli highlights the multitude of viewpoints and the plethora of interpretations generated by representations of war, in all its horror and beauty, its contours and brutality.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The representations of conflict that fill our screens function as archives, serving, for some artists, as material for constructing new narrative forms. For others, they are systems for producing war images and information (real or fictitious) that influence how images and narratives are manufactured. The works described and analyzed here attest to a close link among art, war, and the media; or more precisely, to a material point of contact\u200a\u2014\u200athe image\u200a\u2014\u200aamong all protagonists deeply or remotely interested in war, be they journalists, news anchors, the military, viewers, or artists.
<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Translated from the French by **Louise Ashcroft<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n**
Aernout Mik, Leila Zelli, Marie-H\u00e9l\u00e8ne Leblanc, Omer Fast, Rabih Mrou\u00e9<\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In the introduction to the exhibition catalogue for A Different War (1990), curator Lucy R. Lippard states the \u00adfollowing about artists who created works during the Vietnam War: \u201cArtists were particularly \u00adsusceptible to the visual power of war images on TV. Yet only the best-informed were able to sift out the real news between the dots and [NOTE count=1]lines.\u201d[\/NOTE][REF count=1]Lucy R. Lippard, A Different War: Vietnam in Art, exhibition catalogue (Bellingham: Whatcom Museum of History and Art, Real Comet Press, 1990), 10.[\/REF]<\/br>","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":147035,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[882],"tags":[],"numeros":[2230],"disciplines":[],"statuts":[],"checklist":[],"auteurs":[1016],"artistes":[2052,2065,2044,2053],"thematiques":[],"type_post":[],"class_list":["post-147058","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-post","numeros-96-conflict","auteurs-marie-helene-leblanc-en","artistes-aernout-mik-en","artistes-leila-zelli-en","artistes-omer-fast-en","artistes-rabih-mroue-en"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/147058","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=147058"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/147058\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":273666,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/147058\/revisions\/273666"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/147035"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=147058"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=147058"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=147058"},{"taxonomy":"numeros","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/numeros?post=147058"},{"taxonomy":"disciplines","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/disciplines?post=147058"},{"taxonomy":"statuts","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/statuts?post=147058"},{"taxonomy":"checklist","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/checklist?post=147058"},{"taxonomy":"auteurs","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/auteurs?post=147058"},{"taxonomy":"artistes","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/artistes?post=147058"},{"taxonomy":"thematiques","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/thematiques?post=147058"},{"taxonomy":"type_post","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/type_post?post=147058"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}