Originally broadcast October 27, 2013.
In October of 2013 the Institute Of Modern Art, Brisbane exhibited a work that for some gallery patrons was too intense or confronting to allow a full sitting. It was Swiss artist Thomas Hirschhorn’s Touching Reality, a looped video work that for 7 minutes flicked through the less seen images of war that have generally found themselves delegated to the dark corner of the internet. War torn bodies have their faces unrecognisable, limps and bodies contorted and disfigured, and in many cases what were once the innards of a fatalty sit entirely outside. The images are collected on a tablet such as an iPad, and for the duration a single, anonymous hand guides through the horror, pausing and zooming in on some details with a never-explained motive.
In response, the IMA hosted a 6-member panel response titled Destroyed Human Bodies, featuring The University of Queensland’s Rex Butler, the Head of Art at the Australian War Memorial Ryan Johnston, Queensland College of Art’s William Platz, University of Queensland’s Elizabeth Stephens, and Online Editor of Religion and Ethics for the ABC, Scott Stephens. As the panel describes, there are problems with the work and to which the work speaks, namely the ‘otherness’ of each subject, as the non-white, non-western emblems of war, being scanned through by a white iPad user. This reading can further problematise the role of these images as they sit in our consciousness: a tourism through the horrible retains a distance from the arena or war in which these images are taken, and at worst only a fleeting engagement with the content of the images ever takes place.
Song: Throbbing Gristle - Six Six Sixties
www.ima.org.au http://www.ima.org.au/pages/.exhibits/touching-reality284.php
