Conflict Consumption
Full HD 16:9, Colour, Sound
20 min
2019
Shot in Ila Pensionate, Oslo
and in Ramallah, Hebron, and Jerusalem in Palestine and Israel
Plaster and clay casts
Conflict Consumption tells the story of a journey conducted for both artistically reasons, as well as being a visual metaphor of the artists need for understanding, in order to create. This desperate need to understand someone or something becomes an important note in the conversations. Instead of seing and hearing the interviews from the West Bank, we see the artist in conversation with her colleague Iris Bengtsson.
Conflict Consumption discusses the ethics around being a visual artist in situations like this, whilst at the same time clinging on to the starting point of the project namely Necropolitics.
Necropolitics, from Achille Mbembe (b.1957) is the use of social and political power to dictate how some people may live and how some must die. Necropolitics is a theory of the walking dead, namely a way of analysing how "contemporary forms of subjugation of life to the power of death" forces some bodies to remain in different states of being located between life and death. Mbembe uses the examples of slavery, apartheid, the colonisation of Palestine and the figure of the suicide bomber to show how different forms of necropower over the body (statist, racialised, a state of exception, urgency, martyrdom) reduce people to precarious conditions of life.
Installation view from Kunstakademiets Bachelor graduates exhibition, 2019, Ila Pensionate, Oslo.