The Man From The Internet, 2017

Basel 2018
The Man From The Internet

Massimodecarlo

Installation
Steel, wood, TBD, ink on paper, hand cast polyurethane and dirt frame
240.0 x 325.0 x 610.0 （厘米）
94.5 x 128.0 x 240.2 （吋）
The Man From The Internet consists of unique versions of the image of an unknown dead man, rendered painstakingly over a period of 10 years. It acts both as a monument to the fragility of individual life when confronted with history and as a solipsistic echo chamber for the creepy obsession with the death of a stranger. The source image is from a website documenting crimes of the Russian army during the Chechen wars of the 1990s. Nothing about the image confirms the provenance of the body: It could just as easily document Chechen atrocities against Russians – or almost any conflict in the world. The image floats in the virtual medium of the Internet – an image file, not an image. The Internet becomes analogous to a projective psychic space inhabited by ghosts. Such spectral images continue to multiply, invisible to the naked senses. The setting in which 15 of the 100 existent drawings are shown is a makeshift trailer similar to the vehicles filled with dead refugees occasionally abandoned on international highways, pointing to the endless return of unresolved cycles of violence, colonialism, and nationalism that haunt the present and the history of civilization.