Let’s hope that we all are lucky and don’t live in countries that are war-torn! In any case, even if we grew up and live in peace, pictures of violent conflicts come along with our daily lives, our media and news coverage, art and exhibitions. All day, every day. In this age of seemingly permanent global warfare, the experience of violent conflict is continually restaged in visual culture – regardless of its particular communication medium, whether films, documentaries, mainstream journalism or user-generated media, all of them serve as “the ideological, consensus-building theater of conflict.” Based on this fact, the new international group exhibition “An I For An Eye” at the Austrian Cultural Forum New York brings together different artistic reactions to the ways in which media representations of violent conflict are increasingly rendered through an individualised or even banal perspective.

“An I For An Eye” which will open in mid-September features artists who work 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. Using a number of strategies, these artists deconstruct—and contest—the affective means by which violent conflict is presented, imagined, experienced, and consumed.

 . . . 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.

Curated by Stamatina Gregory & Andreas Stadler. Visit acfny.org for more information.

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.

AN I FOR AN EYE, Counter-Representations of Geopolitical Conflict, 18 September 2013– 06 January 2014, Austrian Cultural Forum New York (ACFNY).

Image: Isabel Rocamora, Still from Body of War (2010), 16 mm transferred to HD, single channel color projection, stereo, 20:49 min. Courtesy of Galeria SENDA, Barcelona (Spain).