Don't Start With The Good Old Things But The Bad New Ones

Adam Broomberg, Oliver Chanarin

War, violence, terror, murder, homicide – a bloody trail of brutality runs through human history. In every society, conflicts have long been crucial narratives anchored deep in individual and collective consciousness. But how are they documented and disseminated through the media? In a kind of re-enactment, artists Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin reinterpret the Holy Bible andBertolt Brecht’s War Primer in such a way that they juxtapose concrete accounts of violence with shocking photographs, superimposing the text over large areas. The result produces an effect of distortion using materials from theArchive of Modern Conflict as well as photographs found in the Internet; it not only questions the role of the visual author and his or her position situated between enlightenment, personal involvement and propaganda, but also works against an unthinking reception of text and image. Hence the artist duo challenges the viewers’ habits of seeing and turns them into critical observers who do not passively get lost in history.