Omar Mismar

During the summer of 2014, Mismar scrolled through the images of the Israeli bombings of Gaza, mesmerized behind the computer screen by their beauty. They were stunning and his engagement with them, so far away from the "event," was based on purely flat aesthetic grounds—which is uncannily perverse. Attempting to deface the image, he inserts the names of the victims of the attack into its script code. Each name typed into the script alters the photograph and leaves its mark. While trying to defile the visual, to escape from the beauty of this violence, a different aesthetic transpires, that of the glitch. With naming the dead, the notion of a monument emerges, reinforced by the sculptural quality of the smoke cloud.

Image courtesy of Hatem Moussa/AP.

Video, 11 hr. 43 min.
San Francisco, 2015