This new international group exhibition at the Austrian Cultural Forum New York gathers together different artistic reactions to the ways in which media representations of violent conflict are increasingly rendered through a humanist, individualized, and even banal perspective.
In this moment of seemingly permanent global warfare, the experience of violent conflict is continually restaged in visual culture. Films, documentaries, mainstream journalism, and user-generated media serve as the ideological, consensus-building theater of conflict. Seen most clearly through the intimate renderings of soldiers, agents, and politicians, the identificatory power of the personal overwhelmingly occludes the broader constructs of the political. The artists in AN I FOR AN EYE foreground this complex politics of attachment, detachment, and affect in their counter-representations of conflict.
The exhibition, which was curated by Stamatina Gregory and the Austrian Cultural Forum’s departing director, Andreas Stadler, features artists working in different regions and from within different contexts, all sharing a particular focus on personal and distributed media, the cinematic, and the contemporary culture of spectacle.
Artists: WAFAA BILAL, ANETTA MONA CHISA & LUCIA TKÁČOVÁ, AD VAN DENDEREN, G.R.A.M., AN-MY LÊ, RABIH MROUÉ, ISABEL ROCAMORA, GERHARD RÜHM, LARISSA SANSOUR, DREAD SCOTT, TARZAN & ARAB, SHARIF WAKED, CHRISTOPH WEBER, ANNA WITT