Become a Member
Life

The French art of cliché and Middle East bias

May 1, 2008 23:00

By

Nick Johnstone,

Nick Johnstone

1 min read

Israel fares badly at a Paris exhibition

On the Paris Metro, heading to the Pompidou Centre, there are stickers declaring Israel “a terrorist state”. Once inside Les Inquiets (The Anxious), an exhibition “dealing with the subject of the war in the Middle East” through the work of five artists personally touched by the region’s conflicts, Israel does not fare much better.

The show opens with Israeli artist Yael Bartana’s 2004 Low Relief II, a video projection resembling a mobile frieze. In the ghostly white of the murky images, soldiers appear to be wrestling with an unknown public.

The images are militaristic, predictable and instantly undermine Polish curator Joanna Mytkowska’s statement that she hand-picked the artists for their ability “to translate the oppression of a conflict into an alternative language based on the critical analysis of its causes and background…” There is no alternative language here. Just the expected, over-used images of conflict.