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1981
Violence, Part 2
  • ISSN: 2040-3682
  • E-ISSN: 2040-3690

Abstract

Photographs of violence carry an implicit critique of the social order from which they emerge. This necessitates the systemic management of their affect. Recognition of the experience carried by these signals has the potential to catalyse and contribute to emancipatory thought and action. The apparatus of epistemic control – characterized here as the – has evolved to neutralize their affective potential. Certain artworks that reconfigure photographs of violence illuminate the nature of this neutralizing mechanism. They mimic and subvert the forms of representational archivization and suggest a a repository of traumatic representation which serves to release affective trauma from its epistemic suppression. One example of this counter-archival practice is – . A body of work from 2011 by artists Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin, which uses Bertolt Brecht’s or (1955) as a point of departure for examining the representation of twenty-first century violence.

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2024-01-18
2026-04-14

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  • Article Type: Article
Keyword(s): archive; atrocity; body; death; photography; representation; violence; warfare
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