Before the Event/After the Fact offers a wide-ranging examination of the representation of war in contemporary photo-based practice, presenting works that depict training sites, combat zones, forensic reconstructions, and popular entertainment. The exhibition highlights conceptual, documentary, and architectural imaging techniques, investigating the visual relationship between staged images and real events, and between factual data and their digital representations. Photographs by Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin, An-My Lê, and Peter van Agtmael combine the apparent clarity of documentary imagery with the ambiguities of reality itself, while video installations by the filmmaker Harun Farocki and a digital animation and interactive work created by the interdisciplinary design studio SITU Research capture the present and future of digital-imaging technologies and their potential applications.
Past exhibition
Exhibition: Before the Event/After the Fact: Contemporary Perspectives on War
Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin, Tze’elim Military Base, Negev Desert (Chicago #2), from the
series Chicago, 2006. Digital chromogenic print. © Broomberg & Chanarin, courtesy the artists
Harun Farocki, still from Serious Games I: Watson is Down, 2009. 2-channel video, color and sound,
7 mins., 40 secs. © 2010 Harun Farocki
An-My Lê, Film Set (“Free State of Jones”), Battle of Corinth, Bush, Louisiana, 2015. Inkjet print.
Courtesy STX Entertainment
Views of the Exhibition
Exhibition organized by Judy Ditner, the Richard Benson Assistant Curator of Photography and Digital Media. Made possible by the Art Gallery Exhibition and Publication Fund.