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Channel Zero, by Katerina
Gregos
We live within a culture marked by violence, both real and simulated.
Acts of violence and references to it, whether pragmatic or fictional,
dominate television, film, newspapers, magazines, video games, cartoons,
books, and a wide plethora of cultural manifestations. To this excessive
proliferation of violent images and texts we mostly react as passive observers.
The quantity and frequency of these representations has stripped them
of the effect they once had, often neutralizing them and turning them
into abstractions. In the society of the spectacle where the image exercises
an all-pervasive power and everything tends to be reduced to mere representation,
images of violence have become commonplace, yet another product for consumption.
In the wake of the recent war in Iraq and the subsequent occupation, the
international ‘war against terrorism’ and the continuing Israeli-Palestinian
conflict, this culture of violence seems to be heightened, accentuated
by the increasingly polarised division of the world into good and bad,
‘us’ and ‘them’. As a result, it appears we increasingly
exist in a state of (almost) constant alert; post-1989 euphoria and optimism
have given way to cynicism, pessimism and the return of fear as a very
real issue. Invisible walls of terror, ignorance and hate have replaced
the walls of the cold war.
Within this expanding culture of violence,
the relationship between fact and fiction has been conflated, as
it is often difficult to distinguish between the two. Real life
events involving explicit violence have become the basis of a perverse
sort of entertainment in television and the entertainment industry;
on the other hand, news casting and journalism have become increasingly
formulaic, sensational and less ‘neutral’ and ‘objective’.
The barrage and repetition of violent imagery in many cases causes
detachment and indifference. |
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The fact is, that calamity (of any kind) remains
largely ungraspable and un-representable as we, the audience, increasingly
experience the world through the filter of the media. Paul Virilio
has called this phenomenon “fin de siecle infantilization”,
where the reality of battle, for example, is reduced to the flickering
of images on a screen. In fact, there are many who argue that war
and other such massive manifestations of violence, no longer exist
in real locations but have been reconfigured as electronic artifice,
stripped of its traditional trappings, remaining undefinable and
technologically mystified (Jean Baudrillard). While this is partly
true, depending on where one happens to reside (in the literal and
metaphorical sense), we cannot reduce violence simply to its representation.
One could indeed claim that we are experiencing and perceiving the
world in different gears: whether real, mediated or simulated. But,
the fact is that, for some people, reality is VERY real. The current
situation in the Middle East, for example, reinforces this point.
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The artists who will participate in this exhibition
make art that responds to the culture of violence that surrounds
us and explore differing – often problematic - representations
of violence in the media, entertainment industry or society in general
to analyze, undermine, deconstruct or simply critique them. They
examine the social, political, and cultural as well as the personal
aspects of violence through film, video, photography, digital media
and the Internet. In many ways, this is an exhibition about media
using new media. |
| It thus aims to question media strategies and mechanisms
of representation and examine the sublimative power of the media
image. The artists in it pinpoint the often-paradoxical ways that
violence is represented: its trivialization, banalization, normalization
or its spectacularization, glamorization, sensationalization. They
examine the conflation of violence as both spectacle and putative
reality that often occurs in the media in order to point to their
social disconnect and their tendency toward excess or oversimplification
in their anxiety-driven quest for ratings. Other artists examine
the more personal aspects and repurcussions of the experience of
violent confrontation.
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In this exhibition one will be able to trace complex strategies of socio-political
critique and satire, gestures of playful ambivalence and irony; insightful,
humanistic, piercing or humorous reflections and re-presentations on the
familiar, the distressing or the iconic that expose the often voyeuristic
nature of ‘consuming’ violence. The artists in “Channel
Zero” are simultaneously engaged in a serious critique of the role
of images in our society, at a time when we, the public, seem increasingly
immobilised in front of our television sets in morbid anticipation of
the next catastrophic event, numb, indifferent and impervious to real
human suffering. As a result, one of the key concerns of the exhibition
is a reflection on the personal and psychological dimension of how violence
is perceived or experienced, not only in the public arena, but also on
a more personal level.
However, apart from being fixated with images of violence and catastrophe
the exhibition will aim to offer a redemptive alternative, which reflects
the ever-increasing desire for a culture of peace and a critique of the
war-mongering currently fostered by the Bush administration, for example.
As a result, some works will present a restorative or humorous vision,
a subversive counterpoint to the often absurd way in which media portray
events, attempting to re-install the sense of empathy that has been lost
to societies force-fed a diet of daily catastrophology. Through their
works, artists will attempt to comment on, counter and transform the conventions
of the mass media, which frequently objectify violence. Such a thematic
focus is now even more contextualised in the light of recent world events.
Some of the artists themselves come from countries that have recently
been - or are - engaged in conflict and are thus in a particular position
to be able to understand such complexities and especially the distinction
between the real and the re-presented.
To what extent can representations or intimations of violence awaken our
consciousness? How do artists react, as a new kind of war mongering becomes
part of the current status quo? How do they react to the polarized conception
of the world that advocates surveillance and control over freedom in return
for safety? Sifting through the often-deceptive images created by the
media, they point to the heavily mediated perceptual field of world events
and offer alternative readings of them.
Katerina Gregos is an independent curator and critic based in Athens.
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