Narrative Terrorism
Stone lithograph
12”x17”
Narrative Terrorism examines the effects of the colonial imagination on the Arab body. The image on the right comes from a series of postcards that French colonists in Algeria would stage, photograph, and circulate widely. These photographs both produced and reinforced the French orientalist imagination of Algerian people and lifestyles. Body and culture is objectified and stereotyped, the violence of these staged images become commonplace as they are circulated as everyday objects.
The left image features a well-known photograph from the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, where Iraqis were subjected to psychological and physical torture by American occupation forces. Here, during American/Western invasion and occupation of Iraq, the is staged in an equally violent position and its image widely circulated in the early 2000s.
The title of this piece references a phrase I first heard in Larissa Sansour’s film In The Future They Ate from the Finest Porcelain.