Camel Collective
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Baghdad, Arabia Standard Time, UTC+03:00
wood, Plexiglass, electronics, cord
600" x 16" x 72"
2005
Baghdad, Arabia Standard Time was produced as a collective gesture in a group exhibition at the Whitney ISP in 2005. It was intended as a gallery-bound placeholder for the US war-adventure in Iraq, marking war-time in a context largely anaesthetized to its effects. The work symbolically links two spaces, the relatively benign space of display, and the largely abstract and invisible (to us) Iraq war-zone, while marking the synchronic, disjunctive experiences of viewing and violence.

The object references world clocks that adorn waiting rooms, airports, government buildings and travel agencies, while also perhaps displaying the disconcerting appearance of an improvised explosive device. The electronic components are set to a 24-hour clock or "military time" marking a forward chronology that marks time towards an infinitely protracted (yet cyclical) horizon.

We are interested in the affects such an apparently mechanical and non-expressive work might evoke. While static, the object is intended to point beyond its time and place, not to a transcendent. Other nor to any intrinsically expressive content, but to the extrinsic and material conditions of an ongoing war. Hardly a memorial, it can perhaps function as a sign for those whose lives are affected precisely insofar as they are unaffected by the war. Thus the clock marks the affect of proximity at a remove.

Exhbibited at:
En cada instante, ruptura, Sala de Arte Público Siqueiros, Mexico City, Mexico, 2010

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