Peace can be established in many ways. The end of a bloody war may once have signified peace, but the well defined battlefields and treaties suggested by history would seem to provide flawed, even illusory sets of criteria for understanding the shape of contemporary conflicts. Despite our updated and sanitized image of modern warfare, brutality has not vanished; it has in fact flourished through new and elaborate methodologies in step with ever more sophisticated approaches to image management. New paradigms of warfare would even seem to be at work in a wider variety of institutional sectors. John Perkins in his 2004 book Confessions of an Economic Hit Man for instance, suggests that international bodies such as the World Bank can be implicated in the violent displacement of sovereign governments.

Agendas and Containers is a collage of fragments from official international institutions - real ones as well as fictional places, stemming from film and entertainment culture. Tasked with the establishment and maintenance of global peace, they serve as a point of mediation between nation states. Through the dislocation and recombination of the iconic visual identities of these international bodies, a hybrid spatial continuum is staged. With the semblances of both blockbuster movie set and metropolitan construction site, the work discloses a certain illusionist character of our notions of sustainability and peace.

YEAR(S)
2016-2017

MATERIAL(S)
UV print on plexiglass, print on carpet

DIMENSIONS
Variable

SHOWN AT
Agendas and Containers was originally created to be displayed at AKBANK SANAT in Istanbul. After the exhibition POST-PEACE was cancelled there, it was hosted first by the WKV Stuttgart and then traveled to Nest, Den Haag.