Touching Reality

Swiss artist Thomas Hirschhorn's video, Touching Reality, conflates seeing and touching. We watch fingertips scroll through photographs on a touchscreen. The photographs are of corpses and carnage; scenes of war, violence, and dismemberment; bodies burnt and shredded. These are images we do not tend to find in newspapers, but which are accessible on the internet.

We see heads blown apart; bits of muscle, viscera, and brain matter.

Unidentified, the shots are generic (they could be from any one of a number of distinct political contexts) yet specific (deprived of a wider political context, we see individuals uniquely mangled). The fingers caress the screen, stopping to zoom in for more detail, then move on. But we don’t know their motivation, whether concerned or prurient—or neither. Certainly, they show us more than we might care to see. Hirschhorn’s video conflates seeing and touching, recalling doubting Thomas—who needed to touch the wound before he could believe. Thomas Hirschhorn is represented by Galerie Chantal Crousel, Paris.

(from http://www.artabase.net/exhibition/4733-thomas-hirschhorn-touching-reality)

watch here (at your own risk)

http://vimeo.com/55482318