RUSSIAN ROULETTE
Russian Roulette, 2013
Video (color, sound), 1’48 min.
This short glimpse into a road-trip by car in Iraqi Kurdistan plays with the viewers’ senses and bewilders them with questions regarding the ambiguous and all the more manipulative nature of contemporary media, thus challenging our understating of seeing, hearing, and knowing. The story, narrated in Kurdish by a male speaker from the local radio (or so it seems, at first sight), is translated into English, but with a provocative twist: the subtitles do not refer to what comes to expression in the video. There is the misbalance between what recorded images have to show, the surreal, even humorous radio-narrative, and the fact that neither of them is necessarily recognizable or mutually related. Qaradaki intentionally triggers this situation to pose a question: How war images in general (and from the territories east and south of Europe, such as Asia, Latin America and Africa in particular) are interpreted in the presumably war-free Western world, and how the non-Westerners allow themselves to be inspired and intrigued by the popular (though not real) conceptions of ‘democracy and freedom’ as proposed by the West – and to what extent the power of such misperceptions, on either side, are conditioned by the power of any media (including the radio or a mobile-phone camera).
Russian Roulette, 2013
Video (color, sound), 1’48 min.
This short glimpse into a road-trip by car in Iraqi Kurdistan plays with the viewers’ senses and bewilders them with questions regarding the ambiguous and all the more manipulative nature of contemporary media, thus challenging our understating of seeing, hearing, and knowing. The story, narrated in Kurdish by a male speaker from the local radio (or so it seems, at first sight), is translated into English, but with a provocative twist: the subtitles do not refer to what comes to expression in the video. There is the misbalance between what recorded images have to show, the surreal, even humorous radio-narrative, and the fact that neither of them is necessarily recognizable or mutually related. Qaradaki intentionally triggers this situation to pose a question: How war images in general (and from the territories east and south of Europe, such as Asia, Latin America and Africa in particular) are interpreted in the presumably war-free Western world, and how the non-Westerners allow themselves to be inspired and intrigued by the popular (though not real) conceptions of ‘democracy and freedom’ as proposed by the West – and to what extent the power of such misperceptions, on either side, are conditioned by the power of any media (including the radio or a mobile-phone camera).
