C-prints and gelatin silver prints, plexiglass, graffiti
Various sizes
Part of the Circumambulation cycle
Blind Walls (I Hate Grnd Zero)
Blind Walls (I Need Grnd Zero)
Blind Walls (I Speak Grnd Zero)
Blind Walls (I Claim Grnd Zero)
Blind Walls (I Spin Grnd Zero)
Blind Walls (I Forsake Grnd Zro)
Blind Walls (Untitled)
An unbearable ambiguity
In the end, the meaning of an event’s time is its appalling, unbearable ambiguity. We would like to see it in the present, we would like to seize its “decisive moment” yet we find ourselves stuck in images from the past that continue to haunt our present. We would like “not to judge, not to hate, not to mock, but only see and understand” like Spinoza, but we see nothing, and an unconscious hatred seems to underlie every image. In a way, the series of tags on the surface of framed photographs of “phantom” Parisian buildings function as a form of catharsis. Who is the author? Who is the subject and what is the object of this discontent? A survivor of the events that unfolded on what is now ground zero? Or on the contrary somebody supportive of the terrorists aims? An average citizen of the world who can not stand that the world’s time was suddenly set back to zero by the time of a single city? Or perhaps also the artist himself, forever marked by an event which he seeks to comprehend, to make his own, but which will never be his own, and yet will never let him go • Pierre Zaoui, On the Communication of Events