In January, I was offered the opportunity to introduce the exhibition of my colleagues Natalie Krekhno and Anna Mudra at the opening of the exhibition 'life: war edition' at SomoS Arts, Neukölln.
From the moment that I was invited - and of course accepted - I understood that I would fail in this task, because there was no option available to me that worked to satisfy my own criteria for an introduction in this context.
Here is how I failed:
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“Trust in Hell”
Delivered 14.02.2023
for the opening of life: war edition – SomoS Arts, Berlin
Richard Pettifer, critic and theorist of Cultural Workers Studio (support worker)
Thank you very much, I am deeply honoured and humbled to welcome everyone to this exhibition life: war edition from my two colleagues who I will introduce properly in a moment, Natalie Krekhno and Anna Mudra, and their collaborators. Tonight I will offer some short contextual remarks about the works, some background of their origins and objectives, and finally a couple of acknowledgements to the condition in which we find ourselves, upon the mounting of this exhibition.
In 1991, 30 years ago, theorist Jean Baudrillard writes his series of provocations, together retrospectively titled “The Gulf War Did Not Take Place”. The first essay written before the war was called The Gulf War Will Not Take Place, the second written during the war and called The Gulf War is Not Really Taking Place, and the third after the war called The Gulf War Did Not Take Place. The essays causing significant scandal from both victims of that conflict who accused him of devaluing their experience through his position of war as a spectacle, and Western elites who took offence at his attacks on traditions of supposedly enlightened “European” thought in conceiving and understanding the institutional violence of war. For Baudrillard, those traditions manifested best in media systems designed to distance the spectator from the philosophical horrors of war, to cushion also its violent gesture through the process of its mediation, and to create comfort and profit in a spectator experience that causally watches on as things play out on screens and in text. That Baudrillard bothers to – albeit sarcastically – challenge this condition speaks of his own philosophical discomfort with the passive sideshow of violence: how long can we watch on without intervention? How dare we turn our backs, in a sociological sense, on the deeply troubling split in reality which occurs through the impossibility of conceiving atrocity? For his body of theory, this condition necessitates the creation of a “virtual” space – filled with political figures as unreal puppets, hopeless contradictions between the reality we know to exist and reality as it is narrated to us, and how streams of media narrative polish and smooth over the grim reality of fighting for the determination of your own existence.
