| Friendly Fire |
2 works each 120 ×100 cm
Oil on cut-out wood panels / Öl auf ausgeschnittenen Holzpaneelen
2 works each 180 x 40 cm
Oil painting on reflective surface / Öl auf reflektierender Oberfläche
Werkstätte: Malerei und Prozess
Friendly Fire questions how we consume images and narratives of war in the present day, and specifically through the medium of gaming and the military First Person Shooter game.
The project depicts two oversized water guns, instantly readable as toys and unmistakably recognisable as weapons. The gun has long been a dense symbolic object around which questions of power, sovereignty, spectatorship, and bodily vulnerability have been organised and questioned in art. Today the gun’s ubiquitous presence in the visual culture of our zeitgeist is highly concentrated in the military first-person shooter game (FPS), which structures the act of looking around the weapons view point, collapsing the distance between the viewer and the act of violence. The water gun, scaled to the monumental, reclaims that distance. It attempts to make visible the weapon that play conceals. The choice of models is deliberate. The Uzi and the AK-47 carry their geopolitical encoding into the playground. One represents the West, the other the East. Both complicit in the same struggles for power, both ancestral to the weapons that populate every military FPS.
The installation also includes two mirror panels on which two children are painted. The visitor’s reflection appears distorted — present but unresolved. The image resists the ‚Instagramability‘ that has made the atrocity of war as consumable as any other image, the same logic that governs the FPS. But the image is only complete if the viewer engages it, entering the scene alongside the children, implicated in the histories the work depicts.