Greetings from Iraq consists of ten postcards Al-Badri created from “random snapshots from random soldiers at very significant sights.” […] sitting with these images, one becomes disconcertingly familiar with an odd sort of idleness in them, what Al-Badri describes in German as Müßiggang. This idleness teems with vertiginous cognitive dissonance. “You see this impressive building… and then you see the small people around it,” she notes. While protecting a historical monument from their own war, the soldiers alter its very purpose. They enjoy a leisure that Iraqis cannot have, building borders around a people and creating the absurd condition that no new image can be made of this place without signs of the occupier’s brutal presence. This sort of casual image of occupation is created singularly by the US military. Al-Badri scoured the Internet for similar pictures of German soldiers in Afghanistan, but such brazenness contradicts logic and security concerns. Only an imperious police state like the United States would allow this, a devastating visual declaration set upon some of humankind’s oldest monuments: we won. The longer one gazes upon these moments of pause, the louder the dissonance reigns. It becomes clear that naïveté is not a precise descriptor, for these are snapshots of utter disrespect, born of a cultivated arrogance, directed by the calculus of rapacious imperialism. The soldiers’ smiles churn the conscience, sink the heart, and leave on the tongue a bitter aftertaste—bitterer Beigeschmack. More here.