Thursday, June 18, 2009 Catalyst Project Room, Berlin
These images are from the exhibition, Did You Kiss The Dead Body? The title of the exhibition comes from a larger project I am working on that incorporates drawings, sculpture, sound and video. The project comes out of a four year reflection on U.S. Military Autopsy Reports of Afghan and Iraqi men that died in U.S. custody. These reports were first posted on the ACLU's website and released under the Freedom of Information Act. The exhibition is made up of projections of Autopsy Reports and ink anatomical drawings made directly onto the autopsy texts, music derived from the "Torture Playlist" - a list of the top 21 preferred songs used by American soldiers and interrogators to torture prisoners in Iraq, Afghanistan and Cuba, first published in a Mother Jones article by Justine Sharrock last year, and an installation that incorporates a group of cast mouths and autopsy tools on loan from the Berlin Medical Historical Museum. I've been opening the exhibition 3 nights per week from sunset until Midnight. In the next post I'd like to write about and reflect on some of the responses I've received making me understand the exhibition as more of a performance and dialogue between myself and the audience which prompted my costuming last night. Consistently the viewers transfer their thoughts about the "othered" bodies encountered in the autopsy texts onto me. For the viewer I become the site of the othered body and automatically, unconsciously the exhibit becomes conflated with my individual identity.
Hey Raj, (it's Raph)
ReplyDeleteIt took me this long to calm down, tune in, and figure out how to respond to this blog. I'm the opposite of a techno.nerd! A tech.noglodite, perhaps?
About this piece- It's a really interesting concept and piece. I'm curious to know about how it went for you. I would also like to know about the poses/movements you chose. Still other questions: How does the face covering function? i.e., to keep you anonymous; to create distance with the audience and keep you in character; to act as a screen for images; etc. I deal with these issues in my performance work and would love to hear what issues present themselves to you in your work. - Raph
Hi Raph,Thanks for the comments. I too have been getting situated in the blogging world and so far hadn't been able to post comments when I tried. Let's see if this posts. The face covering is a simple gauze bandage, mainly functioning to conceal my identity. It was that almost everyone wanted to shift the gaze from the text onto my body and my particularized and projected identity as Iraqi or Afghan. It was the only basis of understanding people seemed to arrive at when they wondered why I was doing this project. This unconscious and immediate move to deal with me and my identity instead of the absent men documented in the autopsy texts. The poses were improvised and a friend documented for me. What was interesting to me is that I was hanging out on the sidewalk dressed like that and noone interacted with me or said anything. They didn't even stare. It was a peculiarly Berlin "coolness" and everything is ok and nothing shocks- kind of response. I never anticipated this performative element but felt compelled to literalize the process that was already in place; namely being a stand in for the other; a stand in for the traumatized body....
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