reviews MEMORIAL TO THE IRAQ WAR
MeMorial to
rituals of remembrance – poppy wearing – with those of protest for her
proposed performance piece, while Durant’s plan to pile wreckage from
the iraq war
Baghdad outside both the White House and the Houses of Parliament is a
witty take on the way memorials usually adorn official buildings.
InsTITuTE Of COnTEM pOR ARy ARTs, LOndOn One thing the ICA’s Memorial reveals is that transitory paeans may
23 M Ay – 27 JunE be more appropriate than the sculptural tradition when it comes to this war
and our times. Of those shown, Keith Wilson’s Forest of Steles (all works
2007), a configuration of five shiny coloured monoliths that resembles
It is four years since the invasion of Iraq by US-led coalition forces. a corporate logo, and Marc Bijl’s Iraqi Stars (proposal for a monument), a
Memorial to the Iraq War considers this controversial conflict with specially large-scale trio of concrete and wood pentagrams, show up rather than
commissioned work and proposals for war memorials from 26 international celebrate the obtuse symbolism carried by monuments.
artists. This large and thought-provoking exhibition posits – given the Video and performance work seem perversely better suited to the
ongoing nature of the conflict – how a memorial might be, both at the act of memorialising, acknowledging memory’s ephemerality with fleeting,
imagined close of the war and more generally as a problematic cultural moving imagery. Iman Issa’s single-screen video, in which images from the
expression in our time. Iraq War are shown in succession while an impassive female voice assesses
Yael Davids’s performance piece, in which a group of people assume their potency, explores imagery as aide to memory and concludes that
the form of a human shield, recognises that a memorial is now as much a “there’s nothing more powerful than memory”.
locus for protest as it is for remembrance. Davids’s performers are almost What this exhibition makes clear is that sculpture tradition, by virtue
entirely obscured by the white boards they hold up against themselves; of its fixed and self-contained nature, forecloses further response to a
only their lips, inserted into mouth-shaped holes, are visible. The work war once it has ended. In other words, a monument not only symbolises
explores the futility of protest, recalling the climactic moment in a Greek closure from conflict, but the closing-off of dialogue concerning it. As
tragedy where the chorus can do no more than gape in horror at events. Nietzsche points out in The Birth of Tragedy, sculpture is the artform of
This is a memorial that remembers not only the dead, but also the voice of Apollo, designed to shield but also disengage humans from suffering. The
ignored protesters, all the more poignant for the fact that, as Tony Chakar proposals for an Iraq War memorial displayed at the ICA provide more
points out in a supplementary essay, memorials are traditionally ‘the most than just a full stop to events; relying on extant narratives of protest and
vivid articulation of the language of the victors’. It’s an idea further explored remembrance, they convey something of the multifaceted – and messy
in proposals by Sanja Ivekovic and Sam Durant: Ivekovic yokes together – character of war. Laura Allsop
Marc Bijl, Iraqi Stars (proposal for a monument), 2007, polystyrene, paint, concrete plaster, warning tape,
490 x 368 x 100 cm. Courtesy the artist and the Breeder, Athens
121 Artreview
NEW Sept_REVIEWS.indd 7 7/8/07 15:44:00
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