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Installation

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100 Cheerleaders

100 Cheerleaders, 2008

Susan Seubert's 100 Cheerleaders (2005) is a series of tinplate photographic prints exploring the iconic image of torture and abuse at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. Seubert's serial images reference early cinema and print-based animation technologies such as flip books. The images are constructed using toys and fabric, simple materials that act as metaphors for the banality of violence.

According to Froelick Gallery:

The title, “100 Cheerleaders”, is an ironic reference to the defense in the trial of Charles A. Graner, the convicted Abu Ghraib prison ringleader. Graner’s attorney, Mr. Guy Womack, claimed that, “Using naked and hooded detainees to make a human pyramid was much like what cheerleaders all over America do at football games…and putting naked prisoners on leashes was much like what parents do with their toddler.” Mr. Womack is also quoted in The Seattle Times as saying “in Texas we’d lasso them and drag them out of there.” These photographs of the torture victims from Abu Ghraib illustrate many contradictory elements of the War: how the reports have all been very careful to note that the people in the prison were detainees, not prisoners or prisoners of war; how torture, in times of war, becomes easily justifiable for those who engage in it; how, in the absence of finding weapons of mass destruction, the purpose of the War shifted to the rhetoric of the United States as furthering peace and liberation; how responsibility to the Geneva conventions were neatly sidestepped, despite their clear guidelines that expressly prohibit such tactics; and, finally, how, as Mr. Graner was quoted as saying, “The Christian in me knows it was wrong, but the corrections officer in me couldn’t resist making a man [urinate on] himself.” The installation of “100 Cheerleaders” is intended to provide a place and point to contemplate these contradictions and to be faced with the uneasiness of a confrontation by a person who cannot see the viewer, but holds the viewer accountable nonetheless.

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7,000 Oak Trees

Some of the 7,000 Oaks planted between 1982 and 1987

Joseph Beuys's 7,000 Oak Trees 7,000 Oak Trees (1982) was a work of land art that was created for the Documenta 7, an exhibition of modern and contempoary art that happens every five years in Kassel, Germany.

First, Beuys delivered a large pile of basalt stones, which, when seen from above formed large arrow pointing to a single oak tree that he had planted. Next, he announced that the stones should not be moved unless an oak tree was planted in the new location of the stone. With the help of volunteers, the artist was able to plant seven thousand trees over several years, each with an accompanying basalt stone. The last tree was planted on the opening of Documenta 8.

Beuys intended this project to be the first stage in an ongoing program of tree planting throughout the world as part of a global mission to effect environmental and social change. On this note, he stated [1]:

The planting of seven thousand oak trees is thus only a symbolic beginning. And such a symbolic beginning requires a marker, in this instance a basalt column. The intention of such a tree-planting event is to point up the transformation of all of life, of society, and of the whole ecological system . . .

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Domestic Tension

Domestic Tension, 2007

Wafaa Bilal's (2007) Domestic Tension was an installation and performance at Flatfile Gallery in Chicago, IL. Over the course of 30 days in May, 2007, Bilal lived inside a room in the back of the gallery. The defining feature of Bilal’s sparsely furnished room was an ominous paint gun, which was connected to the Internet via direct feed. Anyone who visited the exhibit’s website could take control of the gun and fire at will. The piece can be described as an artistic rumination on the interconnections between technology, killing, entertainment, morality, and the global war on terror.

Motivated by a television report about a soldier remotely firing missiles in Iraq while sitting comfortably in Colorado, Bilal devised this piece as a response to the abstractness of contemporary war and its consequences—consequences that are intensely personal to him, having lost both his father and brother in Iraq as a result of the ongoing U.S. military campaign. By the end of the installation, more than 60,000 people from 130 countries shot at him.

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Guantanamera

Guantanamera, 2007

Alonso Gil and Francis Gomila’s 2007 Guantanamera literally gives voice to the sounds of torture and hypocrisy resonating from the war of terror. A multimedia sound installation that reflects on the use of music as a torture instrument, Guantamamera challenges the war of terror’s technologies of forgetting by establishing audioconceptual sites of remembrance and reflection.

Located inside one of the air vents of Madrid’s busy subway system, Guantanamera utilized a high-amplification sound system to blast multiple versions of “La guantanamera,” a popular Cuban folk song, out onto the street. Serving as a direct reference to the infamous US military base and detainment camp at Guantanamo Bay, Guantanamera encourages reflection on the American use of pop, rap, and heavy metal music as a mode of sleep deprivation and interrogation of detainees.

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Lustmord

Lustmord, 1993-94
Lustmord, 1993-95

Jenny Holzer's Lustmord is a response to the raping of women as a strategic military tactic used by the Bosnian-Serb forces during the war in Yugoslavia (1992-5). Lustmord is the German word for sexual murder involving rape. The graphicness of this work is designed to make the viewer realize their own mortality and the innocence of people involved in war crimes. The piece is made up of LED signs, photographs and human remains (bones) inscribed with words and phrases.

According to Nancy Princenthal at BNET

The Lustmord inscriptions imply three voices - a perpetrator, a victim and an observer of unspeakable crimes. Their positions are of necessity radically opposed, but their words all share a peculiar cadence: it is awkward, primal. ("I am awake in the place where women die." "The color of her inside out is enough to make me kill her.")

According to the Whitney:

The Whitney’s installation consists of human bones, both male and female specimens, laid out like artifacts on a found wooden table. Some of them feature silver bands engraved with fragments of text that detail the rape and murder of women from the perspectives of victim, perpetrator, and witness. The circular texts cannot be read all at once, a metaphor for the variety of viewpoints expressed.

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Moving Forest

Moving Forest, 2008

NL Architects' Moving Forest (2008) is a temporary forest of trees installed in 100 shopping carts. The project was inspired by a children’s story about a forest that moves at night so that people trapped in it can never escape. The installation was part of the 2008 Urban Play event in Amsterdam.

According to NL Architects:

‘Moving Forest’ is NL Architects’ answer to the lack of green in contemporary urban environments. One might occasionally find a carefully designed patch of plants or shrubbery there, but nothing like the majestic parks and shady trees that can be found in historical city centres. So they designed a park on wheels, with trees in shopping carts. Around a small street bench, the public can rearrange their own little park and thus create a nice green view and a bit of shade.

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Nuage Vert

Nuage Vert, 2008

HeHe's (Helen Evans and Heiki Hansen) Nuage Vert (Green Cloud) (2008) was a site specific week long public installation that used laser tracking to project a green illumination onto the chimney emissions of the Salmisaari power plant in Helsinki, Finland. The illumination adjusted its shape and size to the contours of the vapor with the dimensions of the green glow directly reflecting the electrical consumption of nearby residents.

According to HeHe:

Nuage Vert is based on the idea that public forms can embody an ecological project, materialising environmental issues so that they become a subject within our collective daily lives. Its material, collective and aesthetic dimension distinguishes it from other approaches. A city scale light installation onto the ultimate icon of industrial pollution, alerts the public, generates discussion and can persuade people to change patterns of consumption.

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Post Global Warming Survival Kit

Post Global Warming Survival Kit, 2008

Petko Dourmana's Post Global Warming Survival Kit (2008) is an interactive multimedia installation. It features a two-channel-projection that shows infrared pictures of the North Sea as an apocalyptic scene that are only viewable via night vision devices.

According to Artistic Director of Edith Russ House for Media Art Sabine Himmelsbach:

In his infrared installation Post Global Warming Survival Kit, the Bulgarian artist Petko Dourmana plunges viewers into a post-apocalyptic eschatological scenario of the kind described so compellingly in countless science fiction novels or Hollywood films. Dourmana makes the fear of an invisible menace palpable, something to be physically experienced. On entering the room, viewers at first think there is nothing in it but an old caravan. Only the use of a night vision device enables viewers to experience the landscape surrounding them.

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Slavery! Slavery!

Slavery! Slavery!, 1997

Kara Walker's Slavery! Slavery! (1997) is an 85 foot-long, 360-degree panoramic installation of black silhouettes on a white wall. Curated by the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, Minnesota, the cyclorama, depicts representational tropes of the Antebellum South that are both racialized and sexualized.

The form itself also references this era the cyclorama is a proto-cinematic genre of painting that was popular in the 19th century. It invites visitors to move within the piece, setting the images into action and creating the illusion of depth and animation. Walker wanted to create a space where viewers felt they were part of the scene, a scene that had no beginning and no end. One may connect this un-ending narrative to the history of race in America, a history of struggle which seems fraught and never-ending.

According to Walker:

Slavery! Slavery! was the first time that I had a completely circular space to surround the viewer and kind of build a narrative that doesn't actually start on the left. I didn't want for it to be read from left to right like the pieces that were on a flat wall.

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Village Pet Store and Charcoal Grill

Village Pet Store and Charcoal Grill, 2008

Banksy's Village Pet Store and Charcoal Grill (2008) is a mock pet supply shop, filled with animatronic creatures like a rhesus monkey and would-be creatures like fish sticks swimming in a tank.

According to Banksy:

I wanted to make art that questioned our relationship with animals and the ethics and sustainability of factory farming but it ended up as chicken nuggets singing.

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You Have the Right to Know

You Have the Right to Know

Free Soil's You Have the Right to Know is a consumer awareness project in which pieces of fruit are covered with wrappers containing information about alternative food systems and urban farming. The wrappers are designed to teach consumers about every phase of a product's life including how it influences the environment and ourselves.

According to Free Soil:

Free Soil has produced a run of FRUIT wrappers, a website, and a traveling installation as part of an initiative to inform people about alternative food systems and local food movements. The wrappers are disseminated throughout the food chain by piggybacking on oranges. Information will be carried through the food system and into the hands of consumers. The wrapper holds information on a variety of aspects concerning food movements, transport and urban farming. Get your daily dose!

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