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- Black Chronicles
- Black Chronicles is an archive based on photographs from the Bosnian daily newspaper Oslobođenje. The photos are taken from the newspaper’s section covering crime stories and share striking similarities both in motif and composition: armed policeman wearing black masks, close-ups of weapons, handcuffed criminal suspects.
Day after day for many years these images have been appearing in the paper. The repetition of similar visual effects and the same dramaturgy regarding the representation of victims, police and criminal suspects creates a kind of psychotic propaganda. When presented in chronological order, i.e. as a slide projection, the images, decontextualised from the event they originally referred to, offer a narrative that confronts us with a scary picture of contemporary society. Yet the flow of images also has something cinematic about. The montage of close-ups of guns pointing towards us and images of anonymous police task forces intuitively creates suspense, because we know these images not only from newspapers, but also from motion pictures made in Hollywood playing with the very same stereotypes.
We see thousands of images on television, in movies, magazines, newspapers, and the internet every day. As cultural productions, they are steeped in the values, ideologies, and taken-for-granted beliefs of the culture that produces and consumes them. The newspaper photos illustrating crimes from Bosnia are likewise embedded in a social and cultural system and function as a repository of the tacit values and desires of society. But they are also produced within a political economy that favors images of a strong executive authority. The motion picture similarity thus underlines what is already staged in the newspaper images themselves: in a society where crime is omnipresent, only a strong police presence can guarantee our safety.
--Vanessa Müller
Installation view, National Gallery of Kosovo, Prishtina, 2014.
Installation view, Le 116 Centre d'Art Contemporain de Montreuil, 2014.
Cutout newspaper, collage 21x29.7cm
Cutout newspaper, collage 21x29.7cm