THE SPEED OF VIOLENCE

Single channel video for installation

"The beautiful is just the first degree of the terrible"

Rainer Maria Rilke

How is form affected by the impulse and velocity in the gesture of aggression?

The gaze slows down like the pulse of a heartbeat, alienating us from the continuity of movement and exposing the mechanism of cinema. Looking at combat frame by frame, this work exposes the deformations, at once beautiful and horrifying, that occur on the subject as it is captured on celluloid over time, offering a direct documentation of our inherent attraction for, and terror of, human violence.

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This piece is part of The Intimacy of Violence exhibition, a solo show which poetically considers the nature of military training in a series of interrelated moving image works and still images. Positioning Body of War as the central work, in a consciously reiterative way the surrounding pieces play on the military theme of repetition, by quoting the main film to expose further questions on the psychology and representation of conflict and its defence systems.

The exhibition premieres at Galeria Senda and Arts Santa Monica Museum in Barcelona on May the 10th and runs til 12th June 2011. See also Body of War and Fear, Defence, Disappearance.