Terror is, in and of itself, an image making machine. The very point of terror is a spectacle that plays endlessly in the media. In 9/11, thousands may have died, but billions of people watched the attack and the falling towers endlessly until those images were etched into the global psyche. While terrorism and its representations have been widely discussed ever since 9/11, very few of these contemplations have tackled the issue of specific formal qualities and pictorial strategies of terrorism. The exhibition The Dialectics of Terror tries to do exactly that; namely, it investigates certain visual characteristics of the spectacle of Terror and its echoes in contemporary art. The exhibition employs the distinction made by artist Roee Rosen on the principle gap between representations of underground terrorism, produced by terrorist groups, and images of State Terror – this is the gap between figuration and abstraction.
Excerpted from the essay "Aesthetics of Terror" by Manon Slome. Read the full essay >>
