Ch(K)ris(tin). Close Air Support

2018
Two-channel sound installation, ultrafocus sound speaker, mixed media sculpture (kubotan, flowers, nylon 6, polymorph plastic, handguard, Element E-lite Personal Hook Signal IR LED Strobe Light DEVGRU SF NVG EX234, aluminum EcoShape, ceramics), carpet, brown light.

This work raises the question of PTSD (Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder) as a specific moral injury, which combines both organic and political wounds, and how culture could reflect those. How media that can trigger PTSD can become a part of digitalised warfare? While relations between technology and politics changed, and interactions between civilians and military acquired pseudomorphic nature. These new forms of warfare blur the distinction between war and peace, transforming complex states of war into states of peace.

Room 1

The story is about a mental injury inflicted by the War on Terror. Kristin Beck is a retired US Navy SEAL, within 20 years she went through a number of local conflicts. While experiencing gender dysphoria she had also PTSD. Waging two wars - one within her body and the other outside, Kristin has acquired an irregular experience. Beck describes the irregular warfare as cloud warfare, as the remote and asymmetrical form of war based on the digital and remote technology. 

The work plays with the dialog of voices performed in states of abstraction and poetry that reflects on the moral wounds and anxiety; and with a soundscape of music, ASMR-effects and  battlefields. These fragments are either private or ritualistic, their arrangement is close to the sci-fictional poem on the environment critically wounded by the cloud warfare.

Room 2

Mixed media sculpture explores the limits of the synthetic dialog between forms created by Vadim Sidur and Henry Moore. Sidur was often compared to Henry Moore and referred as the Soviet Moore. Despite some formal similarities, their contexts were radically different. Both had experiences of wars and both were injured: Moore was wounded with gas during the First World War, Sidur got a head injury in the Second World War. Both artists were interested in radical experiences of bodies, materials and objects. Both died in 1986. Moore was more famous yet never talked about war; while Sidur's art appealed to catastrophes. 

The mixed media sculpture plays homage to Sidur’s book and the sculpture of the same title: Monuments to the Current State, that he described as the prophet of future global catastrophes.