When P.W. VOIGT attended a NATO air show just after the attacks of September 11, he was surprised by the enthusiastic responses from the audience. Did people need the display of fire-power and military strength to restore their shattered world image ?
That was his impetus for beginning STRANGELOVE, a long-running and still unfinished investigation into the meaning of weapons in peacetime. By examining their public manifestations Voigt exposes the emotions lying behind them. He shows us the flexing of military muscles in the parade and the devout silence of the museum, where weapons are sometimes relics of glorious victories and sometimes a protest against senseless destruction.
Their meaning changes over time. The promise of destruction becomes the memory of the promise, the excitement makes way for sentiment and pathos.
Text: Wim Mellis
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What determines a person’s lot ?
In Human Conditions, the catalogue accompanying the 16th Noorderlicht International Photofestival 2009, six curators reveal their own vision of social and individual struggles and the way in which they shape the circumstances in which people live. From the Gaza Strip to the barrios of Caracas, from refugee centres to the loneliness behind front doors, Human Conditions sketches a penetrating picture of what it mean to be human.
Price: EUR 44,50
Hardcover, fullcolor and duotone
Size 22x28cm, 248 Pages
English (exhibition texts and biographies)
ISBN 978-90-76703-41-1
Distribution: Idea Books
Publication: 2009
Design: Dirk de Jong
Look Inside
The catalogus contains work from the following exhibitions:
War Machines – Wim Melis
(photographers: Robert Hirsch, Gabriel Jones, Shunkichi Kikuchi, Simon Norfolk, Simon Roberts, Paul Shambroom, P.W. Voigt, Yosuke Yamahata)
Point of No Return – Stuart Franklin
Closing In – Lauren Heinz
Ordinary Pain - Simon Njami
Lost – Marc Prüst
Multivocal Histories - Bas Vroege
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Good News,
I am glad to announce, that I was selected to show the Strangelove Project
at the Noorderlicht International Photofestival 2009
Human Conditions 6 September through 4 October 2009 Groningen, the Netherlands
Strangelove – Trinty Test Display
Wim Melis War Machines
What are arms without war? In an intriguing exhibition Simon Norfolk, P.W. Voigt and Gabriel Jones (a.o.) each in their own way isolate tanks, aircraft and rockets from their raison d’être. What meaning, what significance do they have when they fall into disuse? A couple of times a year nuclear rockets without their warheads are fired from California in the direction of the Marshall Islands. In ‘Full Spectrum Dominance’ Simon Norfolk (GB) records this test ritual – a ritual which during the Cold War called up associations of threatened extermination, but in the current climate strikes one as risible. ‘Strangelove’, the contribution by P.W. Voigt (DE), dissects the madness of armaments by looking at their public function in peace-time, from the flexing of muscles in parades through the devout silence of the museum. The emotional freight changes with time. The threat of a bloodbath becomes the memory of that fear, the excitement makes way for sentiment and pathos. In ‘Irhann’ Gabriel Jones (US) goes a step further. His rockets, or parts thereof, are stripped of every scrap of glory by dumping them in a fictional landscape. They are inert, overgrown, abandoned. But what sort of rockets are they? Are they nuclear death-machines or booster rockets for satellites, icons of progress? Jones leads the viewer down the garden path. Are we looking at the desolate landscape of a long-forgotten war, or simply at civilian material that has been put out to pasture? In all these contributions the machines, symbols of might and destruction, lose their terrible charge. What is left is the absurdity of war.
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