BRING OUT YOUR DEAD is a visual-audio exhibit that seeks to create dialogue over the effects of the United State’s drone warfare practices in Pakistan (a country it is not by any official declaration at war with) through the lens of Michel Foucault’s biopolitics to increase awareness about the numerous innocent lives lost in part of the states alleged ‘war on terror.’
The exhibit will be in place from April 9th-12th at the CAP GALLERY (HNES 283, 4700 Keele Street York University) with a special opening event on Tuesday April 9th at 7:00pm. We encourage you and yours to witness the exhibit and contribute to conscious dialogue amongst other visitors and the artists, both through words and with the mediums provided.
The exhibit will include transparent life size sculptures complimented by light, projection, shadow, and sound together creating a multi-medium experience. The transparent nature of the sculptures contributes to the meaning of the piece in the way that the loss of these lives has been made invisible, and only through the reflection of the surrounding is there an adequate lens from which we can observethe extent of devastation, and the cruel intent supporting its continuation.
It is suggested that what symbolizes a states sovereignty is its right to declare war, also described as the “…right to kill.” (Mbembe 2003:6) While the actual count of civilian death is contested, the covert ‘targeted’ overhead drone killing conducted by the United States since 2002 (escalated in 2008 under President Barack Obama’s administration) through the states ‘unofficial’ drone warfare program has resulted in the loss of over 3000 lives without justification, or recourse. (Marsden 2013:2)
Are the methods and morale behind what is nothing short of a “…lethal game of toy story,” (Marsden 2013:2) not best summarized in Foucault’s notion of biopolitics? By continuing to conduct illegal killings through the practice of drone warfare despite international legal criticism is the United States administration implying that some lives are more important than others?
As developed by Michel Foucault in ‘Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–76,’ biopolitics refers to the moral philosophy that some lives are more valuable than others, more specifically determining those who must live and those who must die. (Mbembe 2003: 6) We are living right now to witness the crux of a neoliberal capitalist system, with insatiable greed for resources being the precursor for pre-emptive war, mass murder, and the destruction of the lives and livelihood of ‘Other’ bodies, mostly non-white Muslim bodies, bodies when killed referred to by the White House as ‘bugsplat’ (Marsden 2013:2). More here.