Bogdan Achimescu, Matilda Aslizadeh, Rebecca Belmore,

Jake & Dinos Chapman, Dana Claxton, Douglas Coupland,

Mario Doucette, David Garneau, William Kentridge, Wanda

Koop, Fawad Khan, Emanuel Licha, Shirin Neshat, Michael

Patterson-Carver, Dan Perjovschi, Raymond Pettibon,

Nancy Spero, Althea Thauberger, Jason Thiry, Scott Waters,

Balint Zsako

Diabolique

18 September to 14 November 2010

Oakville Galleries in Gairloch Gardens

and at Centennial Square

Curated by Amanda Cachia

Organized by the Dunlop Art Gallery

Og2 Oakville Galleries 2

It is no pigment powder

Nor myrrh

Pensive odor nor delectation

But flower of blood flush with the skin

Map of blood map of the blood

Bled raw sweated raw skinned raw

Nor tree cut to a white thrust

But blood which rises in the tree of flesh

By catches by crimes

No remittance

straight up along the stones

straight up along the bones-for

copper weight shackle weight heart weight

venoms caravaners of the bite

at the tepid edge of fangs

“Fangs” by Aime Cesaire1

Diabolique cuts a map of blood across white walls.

The terrain opens with a disturbing image of Neil

Stonechild. His brutalized face hits a raw nerve, shaves

close to the bone, particularly in Saskatchewan, where

Diabolique originated. David Garneau’s autopsy portrait

of this 17-year-old First Nations target of racist violence in

1990, face indented, apparently by handcuff blows, reflects

the inherent social and political violence that charac-

terizes the devil’s underbelly of Saskatchewan, whether

those responsible for dominant lore care to admit it or not.

Like everywhere else, Regina is not immune to cruelty

and conflict. The oft-cited, shame-producing Maclean’s

Magazine survey that gives Regina the number one or two

spot (depending on the year) as the most dangerous city

in Canada is an undeniable sign that there is war tak-

ing place close to home.2 War, covert or otherwise, is

being waged against Aboriginal peoples,3 against other

disenfranchised and minority groups, and those who live

below the poverty lines in all of our communities.

Garneau’s portrait bears uncanny resemblance to that

of Emmett Till, a 14-year-old African-American Chicago

boy who was visiting relatives in August 1955. Shot in

the head and thrown in the river with a mammoth cotton

gin fan tied around his neck for allegedly whistling at

a white woman, Till’s death mask photograph reveals

his head mottled and swollen to many times its nor-

mal size. The stark image ran in Jet, and largely through

that medium, both the picture and Till’s story became

legendary. Emmett Till’s mother wanted “all the world”

to witness the atrocity that had been enacted upon her

son.4 Garneau’s painting, entitled Evidence (2006), recalls

the photograph of Till’s and similarly requires an act of

witnessing by viewers. The image is derived from an

autopsy photograph taken of Stonechild published in

the public domain: an official 2004 report compiled by

the Saskatchewan Commission of Inquiry into Matters

Relating to the Death of Neil Stonechild.5 (As a point of

interest, another artist in Diabolique, Rebecca Belmore,

has also reflected upon Stonechild as a subject in her

previous work. Clearly, Saskatchewan is haunted by this

brutal martyrdom.)

In my foreword to the Diabolique catalogue, I pose

the question: “Is our attitude to war, our participation

in and immunity to violence and our ability to act polit-

ically and protest, stronger now, or worse?”6 As Dan

Perjovschi’s evocative drawing on the cover of the cat-

alogue (Progress, 2008) captures, it appears that in the

space between 2000 and 2009, we have grown more ideo-

logical dicks and udders on our virtual military tanks,

an unnatural development akin to Douglas Coupland’s

bio-genetically deformed The Gorgon (2003). The artists

Previous page: Matilda Aslizadeh, Hero of our Time (detail from still), 2008, DVD (19 mins.), courtesy of the artist.

Map of Blood

by Amanda Cachia

and commentators whose work is featured in this show

raise the implicit question: as viewers to such wide rang-

ing approaches to the diabolique, are we swallowing the

chunks of blood and semen of terrorists and their tar-

gets, or of ourselves?

Diabolique invites viewers to walk an existential

line between conflict and conscience7 throughout the

exhibition: the “heart weight” of vomiting blood, blood-

red backgrounds and bloodless car explosions charts

the map of blood. There are painted blood rose dents

on concrete pavements marked by fallen grenades in

Sarajevo, Bush dragging a blown-up, blood-gushing torso

of a soldier in Iraq (blood for oil) and plastic video-game

blood that drips off the face of a child soldier. Like the

ephemeral quality of Perjovschi’s cartoon guerilla draw-

ings, this map of blood—Stonechild’s blood—haunts the

spirit, but what is left in the snow? What is the memorial

trace? In the presence of such atrocity, what space can

there be for any meaningful apology or forgiveness?

Jacques Derrida argues that “true forgiveness con-

sists in forgiving the unforgivable: a contradiction all

the more acute in this century of war crimes” (from the

Holocaust to Algeria to Kosovo to Saskatchewan) and

government-sponsored healing tribunals. He also confirms

Og2 Oakville Galleries 3

Jake & Dinos Chapman, War, 2004, painted bronze, 14.5 x 19.0 x 22.5 cm, courtesy of White Cube, London.

that none but the bereaved may forgive and that there

is absolutely no obligation to do so.

In Shake Hands with the Devil, Lieutenant General

Romeo Dallaire’s extraordinary account of his time serv-

ed as force commander of the UN Assistance Mission

during the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, Dallaire recounts

“watch[ing] as the devil took control of paradise on earth

and fed on the blood of the people who we were supposed

to protect.”8 Who is protecting the widely diverse commu-

nities who live in Saskatchewan? Is it the military bases

in Moose Jaw or Dundurn, sending young men and women

off to Afghanistan? Is it the RCMP or the Regina Police

Service? Or is it ultimately ourselves, fighting for safer

lives, for human rights, for social justice for everyone?

In the end, both military and police operate under “two

contradictory directives, to protect and destroy … they

are representatives of the mechanisms of social con-

trol.”9 How do we subject ourselves and each other to

similar mixed messages and controls?

In Beyond Good and Evil (1886), Nietzsche gives the

“highest priority for achieving personal freedom—the ulti-

mate goal of the individual — to emphasizing knowledge

and above all not looking away from difficult knowledge,

although it may be ugly and even deadly.”10 What can

viewers learn from facing evil in the eye? Is war perma-

nent and peace illusory? Repelled by horror, ironically,

many are equally compelled by the ravages of darkness.

“Against our expectation, we find a covert attraction

to disaster as well as a violent reaction to an image of

beauty.”11The beauty of ugliness is an old theme and the

“iconography of suffering has a long pedigree.”12 Cultural

critic Reesa Greenberg has stated that “playing it safe”

Og2 Oakville Galleries 4

William Kentridge, What will come, 2007, anamorphic projection: 35 mm film transferred to DVD; (8:40 mins.),

courtesy of Marian Goodman Gallery, New York.

is no longer a viable option for museums, curators, critics

or viewers when the questions at hand are, necessarily,

so dangerous.13 Viewers are all implicated in the trans-

gressions of these violent and shameful acts when con-

temporary art enacts such excruciating demands. This

is the provocative challenge that Diabolique brings to

its viewers.

Elaine Scarry argues that “when one hears about

another person’s physical pain, the events happening

within the interior of that person’s body may seem to have

the remote character of some deep subterranean fact,

belonging to an invisible geography that, however por-

tentous, has no reality because it has not yet manifested

itself on the visible surface of the earth.”14 Diabolique

strives to provide audiences with a large geographic

arena in which two temporarily separated but spatially

congruous “chapters” provide opportunities to contem-

plate social and political crises that have indeed mani-

fested and become visible, stemming from Saskatchewan,

Canada, Italy, Romania, Ethiopia, and the rest of the world.

Twenty-one international and Canadian artists share

what is at stake in human violence and challenge view-

ers to look beyond the surface sensationalism of conflict

to confront how invested any one can become in win-

ning at all costs. This work invites consideration of the

palimpsested history of human violence, the ways it

breaks boundaries and always intrudes.

The artists in Diabolique are presenting art for our

time, occasionally providing a glimmer of hope amidst

opportunities for questioning and reevaluation. As the

history of war art — or the horror represented in art —

demonstrates, art can rarely claim to thwart war; it can,

however, trace its too-often ignored effects. While not all

images of war become famous, like Picasso’s Guernica

(1937), each has the ability to imprint. As Norman Rosen-

thal comments in his essay for Apocalypse: Beauty and

Horror in Contemporary Art: “One major task of the artist

is to say that, as human beings ourselves, we are all impli-

cated. It is important that we do not look away and merely

take refuge in superficial beauty … We need to confront

evil visually.”15 Tangible and intangible elements of anxi-

ety, hope and struggle, power and authority, projections

of good, evil, banalities and birthrights, processes of

minoritization, sublime truths within harsh realities,

contemporary and modern renderings of historical events

are all juxtaposed in this exhibit. The images are threat-

ening, and remind us that we live in an age where fear

is both a political tool and a commodity.

In this exhibition, the word war is used in the broad-

est possible sense. While war happens all over the world,

every day, in traditional contexts, war is also waged

in many ways and places. Many wars occur within the

four walls of our own homes and on our televisions, as

artist Martha Rosler famously demonstrated in her body

of photo-collage work, Bringing the war home: House

beautiful (1967–1972). “Assembled from the pages of Life

magazine — where the documentary accounts of blown

bodies, dead babies, and anguished faces flow seam-

lessly into mattress ads and photo features of sophisti-

cated kitchens, fastidiously fertilized lawns and art-hung

living rooms — Rosler’s montages re-connect two sides

of human experience, the war in Vietnam, and the living

rooms in America, which have been falsely separated.”16

Photography and war journalism are represented in

Diabolique by the artist Althea Thauberger, alongside

video documentary in the work of Emanuel Licha. While

all the other mediums in the exhibit offer streams from

the imagination, a photograph and video seem to offer

realistic depictions — but do they? Digital art and photo

manipulation have played great tricks on the human eye.

Historically, within the context of modern warfare, pho-

tography has had relationships with notions of atrocity

and war crimes as evidence, manufactured or not.

Consider also the role of photography in Michael

Patterson-Carver’s drawing of the covering of a large

tapestry reproduction of Picasso’s Guernica in the United

Nations headquarters in New York on February 5, 2003,

when the U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell went there

to make his case for invading Iraq. Maureen Dowd wrote

in The New York Times that, according to diplomats, the

picture would have sent “too much of a mixed message…

Mr.Powell can’t very well seduce the world into bombing

Iraq surrounded on camera by shrieking and mutilated

women, men, children, bulls and horses.”17The suppres-

sion of art to facilitate war underscores the power of the

image in today’s global media culture, even if the image

Og2 Oakville Galleries 5

is a drawing, and not a photograph. To further reinforce

this point, on June 23, 2009, an Associated Press story on

the Yahoo! News website reports that “Iran clamped down

on independent media in an attempt to control images

of election protests, but pictures and videos leaked out

anyway — showing how difficult it is to shut off the flow

of information in the Internet age.”18 Social-networking

sites such as Twitter and Flickr became more prominent

because of the government interventions. The U.S. State

Department, for example, called on Twitter to put off a

scheduled maintenance shut-down following a massive

opposition rally in Iran on June 22, 2009 when authorities

restricted journalists from reporting on the streets. “The

Iranian government also tried to stop its citizens from

spreading information. Internet service and cell phone

service was intermittent, with long delays. Reporters were

also restricted during the 1979 Iranian revolution, which

saw the installation of the Islamic regime in power today.

Government censors and the Internet have often clashed.”19

One of the most iconic media images from the war

in Iraq was a globally broadcast photograph of a hooded

Iraqi prisoner at the notorious Abu Ghraib prison, forced

to stand on a box, naked except for a blanket, his hands

outstretched, apparently wired, in front of his American

Og2 Oakville Galleries 6

Althea Thauberger, Untitled (Ma’ Sum Ghar 1), 2009, colour photograph, 28.3 x 35.5 cm, courtesy of the artist.

captors. This image revolted the world, and marked a turn-

ing point in public opinion about the war. Artist Richard

Serra created a poster (Stop Bush, 2004) that re-works this

iconic image; it subsequently became a symbol for anti-

war demonstrations and activities by artists in the U.S. in

2004. The level of political protest by artists that year —

including posters, artworks, marches, actions, an Artforum

issue dedicated to political protest and various fund-

raising events, exceeded that during the American con-

flict with Vietnam. The Iraq war continues to draw artist

protests.20 In Diabolique, this is demonstrated pointedly

in the work of Raymond Pettibon and Patterson-Carver.

By bringing several artists into the exhibit who reflect

on the genre of left-wing art activism and protest, propa-

ganda or sloganeer art, rather than art “horror,” I am chal-

lenging viewers to think in different directions about the

relationship between art, activism, protest, propaganda,

and dread. Gregory Sholette, in his essay, Snip, Snip …

Bang, Bang: Political Art, Reloaded, discusses the label

“political art” and how many galleries and museums were

adverse to consider hosting such work in the 1980s. “Even-

tually, museums bagged and tagged a limited number

of socially critical artworks. It was, however, a selective

assimilation that favored politically ambiguous work

over the directly interventionist. Meanwhile, those col-

lectives that had been instrumental in forcing-open the

question of art and politics — PAD/D, Group Material,

the Art Workers Coalition, Artists Meeting for Cultural

Change, The Guerilla Art Action Group, Paper Tiger,

SPARC, Carnival Knowledge — were unceremoniously

submerged, partially or wholly, beneath the waves of

normative art history.”21 In bringing Perjovschi and out-

sider artist Patterson-Carver to the group, audiences

can engage with these dissenting artists’ voices. Pre-

viously on the outskirts or margins of society owing to

socio-economic and/or political circumstance, they are,

today, validated within a contemporary gallery con-

text. As political activists, their work contains witty ele-

ments: indeed, the cartoon nature of their work frames

their satiric observations within a traditionally comical

discourse. All “political” subject matter — whether it is

the former Bush administration or other world affairs —

is fair game for these artists.

The title of the exhibition is partially inspired by

Les Diaboliques (1954), a classic French terror film direct-

ed by Henri-Georges Clouzot, the title of which trans-

lates in English as “The Devils.” The women protagonists

are dubbed devils because they plot to murder a man

who has betrayed them. A revenge-fear classic, this

film recalls the ways white supremacists, including

the KKK and Aryan Nation, have projected their own

histories of sexual aggression onto members of sub-

ordinated groups as justification for further dominance

and violence. While combat is commonly seen as mas-

culine, is it really a male domain? Are men heroes in

war and women devils in the battle of the sexes? In

her essay, Reflections on feminism, war, and the politics

of dissent, Leslie Cagan describes war and feminism as

being opposites of each other. “The horror and evil of

war can partly be understood in seeing just how much

it stands in opposition to feminism and feminist princi-

ples. All of the values of feminism are contradicted —

if not rendered impossible to achieve—by the realities of

war and the machinery of war-making.”22 Cynthia Enloe

discusses how definitions of masculinities and feminini-

ties are carved out and integral to the waging of war, and

how power will be wielded based on these definitions.

The use of violence in war to impose control and domi-

nation reinforces the traditional power men have had

over women. Yet, while feminists have long opposed

war’s destructive and futile fatalisms,23 who among us

is exempt from the will to power?

In Nancy Spero’s series of drawings, Vietnam War

from the ‘60s, men are bombs. In Althea Thauberger’s

photograph, female Canadian military personnel climb

Ma’Sum mountain with smiles on their faces, seem-

ingly victorious and almost relaxed despite their roles

in Afghanistan. In Diabolique, the art works show that

gender is not necessarily a basis for explosive definitions

of those who impose, invoke or are victims of violence

and diabolical action. On the other hand, several artists

summon the visual emblem of the phallus as weapon

and tool for destruction, including the drawing by Balint

Zsako that blends man, machine, gun for penis and penis

for gun; the romance novel interventions by Scott Waters

in which erect weapons overlay couples entwined in

Og2 Oakville Galleries 7

Harlequin bliss; and Rebecca Belmore’s totem pole,

wrapped in torn camouflage material. Taking it a step

further, emerging Regina artist Jason Thiry uses imagery

from pornographic magazines interlaced within cam-

ouflage pattern. Thiry’s blend of porn and war demon-

strates how both industries use extreme male and female

body images as weapons of consumer-seduction. In 2007,

an exhibition entitled Love/War/Sex was held at Exit

Art in New York. The paradoxical title demonstrates how

war is central to human coupling, pulling together a

powerful cocktail of emotions, passions and idealistic

convictions. There is a connection between “longing and

violence and love with war, imagining the business of

war in all its sensual manifestations.”24

Weapons used as toys by boys and girls is a cul-

tural practice explored by several artists in the exhibi-

tion including Douglas Coupland, who has reproduced

a giant-size genetically-modified toy solider; Dana

Claxton, who repetitively pulls on the trigger of a plas-

tic toy gun; and Mario Doucette, who explores video

game violence æsthetics in his paintings. Fawad Khan’s

flameless explosions also hint towards video game enter-

tainment — violence that is harmless, even attractive

or sublime, yet disarmingly so. Matilda Aslizadeh’s Hero

of Our Time (2008) also draws on video game æsthetics,

and relies on the classic fall and redemption narrative.

Symbols of war and violence — the visual language of

war — appear in many of the images in Diabolique. Such

symbols and metaphors include the skull, the cross,

helicopters and tanks, the swastika, the phallus/gun,

and much more.

Stepping into immersive fictional narrative and filmic

videos and animations based on historical events by

high-profile artists Shirin Neshat and William Kentridge,

audiences will be delivered into new worlds of nostalgia,

memory, sounds, places, pockets of terror, class, power

and authority, heirarchy and surrealism, and lessons learnt

and lost. These stories, while perhaps not as confronta-

tional as the Jake & Dinos Chapman’s War skull (2004),

or Cross on bomb (1968) by Nancy Spero, nevertheless

Og2 Oakville Galleries 8

Mario Doucette, Monckton, 2008, pastel, ink, pencil and acrylic on wood, 66.0 x 122.0 cm, courtesy of Andrew and Lyndal Walker, Toronto.

illustrate how the power of violence can seep into the

sub-consciousness in other, long-lasting and psycho-

logically damaging ways. Diabolique offers a wide scan

of how violence has been carried out over the ages —

whether it be traditional, romantic or even biblical: bow

and arrow or stoning, as seen in Balint Zsako’s collage

figures cut from Renaissance painting reproductions in

books; through stark black and white images of dictator-

ship and execution; ethnic cleansing through colonial

pillaging and burning of Acadian villages; gas masks,

tanks and airplanes during the Italian-Abyssinian war

of 1935; suicide and protest in the 1953 coup d’état in

which the CIA reinstalled the Shah of Iran; grenades

used in the Vietnam War in the 1970s; car bombs used

today in Karachi, Istanbul, Baghdad, Kabul, New Delhi,

or Bali; or prisoners being left to freeze in the snow or

drown in a river, completing the full cycle of violence

through which history — and ignorance — repeats itself.

Historical icons and perpetrators of violence, ranging

from Hitler to the Ku Klux Klan, Napoleon, Mussolini and

Bush Junior and Senior are invoked and impaled. We see

others who populate the world of violence, war and terror:

Kosovo refugees from the 1990s by Bogdan Achimescu,

front-line soldiers and various manifestations of their

“family” unit, innocent victims, women and children,

parents, concerned citizens.

Diabolique was inspired by a post-September-11

world, whatever that might mean given that the events

took place on the anniversary of the terrorist coup in

Chile, orchestrated in 1973 by the government of the

United States. I was in New York on the most recent 9/11

spectacle and witnessed the events and their aftermath

Og2 Oakville Galleries 9

Nancy Spero, Helicopter, Eagle, (Magnet), Victim, 1968, gouache and ink on paper, 62.0 x 100.3 cm,

courtesy of Galerie LeLong, New York, GL 6302.

(“it felt like a movie,” rather than “it felt like a dream”25).

The city became a macabre gallery, like Diabolique, filled

with an eclectic mix of devilish dioramas, and narratives

influenced by human conflict, torture, the grotesque,

masks, hybrids, and surreal scenes that might recall

Goya’s Disasters of War (1810–1820) or Dante’s Inferno

(1308–1321). Does my proximity to the visibility of the

September 11 event mean that this event was more tragic

and diabolical for me? How close or distant does one

have to be to violent events in order to feel a sense of

horror, shock or loss? Ironically, when I was in New York,

surrounded by the chaos of September 11, everyone ran

to television screens and turned on radios in order to

find out what was happening. I recall sitting in my hotel

room in midtown Manhattan, staring frozen at the TV

screen news reports, and thinking how strange and hor-

rible it was, that while this event was happening in my

own backyard, I still felt quite removed from it, helpless.

Was the power of this event for me partly manifested

through the channels of the media? After all, my reality

of the event, despite close proximity, was still charged

by the media — somewhat disillusioning. Baudrillard

remarked several decades ago that “we live in a world

where there is more and more information, and less

and less meaning.”26 Sontag calls this a “pornographic

appetite for suffering.”27 Why was this event, in this back-

yard, rendered more powerful for some of us than other

violent events in other backyards? The power of the

media to render certain violent events more “diabolical”

than others is at play here. Winnipeg artist Wanda Koop

explores similar ideas in her Green Zone series of paint-

ings in Diabolique, inspired by watching TV distortions of

the Iraq war this decade, similar to Martha Rosler’s inspi-

ration from Vietnam War footage on television in the ‘70s.

Og2 Oakville Galleries 10

Scott Waters, Badland, 2009, acrylic on book cover, 16.9 x 10.0 x 2.5 cm, courtesy of the artist.

More and more people are traveling to trauma zones,

it seems, in efforts to understand the dynamics that

produce them. As Emanuel Licha attempts to show in

his video documentary, War Tourist (2004–2008) in which

he travels from the Auschwitz concentration camp to

New Orleans post-Katrina to the nuclear-bomb site of

Chernobyl, and as an article in the Globe and Mail dated

November 5, 2008, reports, tourists are now flocking to

sites of suffering and even into war zones. Laszlo Buhasz

explores this desire to pay tribute to and look death in

the face. He says “tour buses keep rolling into sites asso-

ciated with death and suffering: the Killing Fields of Cam-

bodia, New York’s ground zero, the genocide memorials

in Rwanda and Nazi death camps in Central Europe.”28

The article also quotes Philip Stone, a senior lecturer

with the University of Central Lancashire in England, who

is studying the phenomenon of “trauma” tourism. Stone

says that visitors have mixed motives for visiting such

sites: some come to remember and pay tribute (or to see

what they have seen in the movies), but for many, visiting

such memorials is a socially acceptable way to confront

the most destructive aspects of human nature. Death has

been abstracted in our culture and moved out of (com-

fortable) everyday discussion—death hides in hospitals

and funeral parlours. Perhaps visiting sites like this can

make death and mortality feel more tangible. In reality,

Og2 Oakville Galleries 11

Balint Zsako, Untitled, 2007, watercolour and ink on paper, 45.0 x 60.0, courtesy of the artist.

however, we never have to travel very far to experience

death and suffering, if we seek to be aware of the oper-

ations of violence in our midst.

Diabolique draws inspiration from the exhibition

Apocalypse: Beauty and Horror in Contemporary Art,

co-curated by Norman Rosenthal and Max Wigram for

the Royal Academy of Arts, London, on display from

September 23 – December 15, 2000.29Two of the artists in

Diabolique, Jake and Dinos Chapman, were in this same

exhibition. The intriguing aspect of the London exhibition—

apart from the drama, and the way that the theatrical and

the heightened sense of suspense were crafted by the

curators—was the manner in which the artists confronted

horror, both present and past. The artists were fearless,

risk-taking and bold in their statements. The curators

thoughtfully situated their project in relation to such varied

sources such as Titian, Caravaggio, Goya, Bruegel, Beuys,

and Charlotte Saloman. Their essay carefully juxtaposed

these great masters with the work of contemporary artists

in the exhibition, from Wolfgang Tillmans to Tim Noble &

Sue Webster, Richard Prince, Gregor Schneidor and many

more. Another exhibition, Mirroring Evil: Nazi Imagery /

Recent Art, curated by Norman L. Kleeblatt in 2002 for

the Jewish Museum in New York, has also provided rich

ground for inspiration and contemplation.

In the foreword to the exhibition catalogue Mirror-

ing Evil: Nazi Imagery / Recent Art, James E. Young asks

some provocative questions about how viewers’ atten-

tion might be directed: “Where are the limits of taste

and irony in art that portrays terror? Must a depraved

crime lead to depraved artistic response? Can art mirror

evil, and remain free of evil’s stench? By including some

powerful and violent images in their work, are artists

somehow affirming and extending them, even as they

Og2 Oakville Galleries 12

Matilda Aslizadeh, Hero of our Time (still), 2008, DVD (19 mins.), courtesy of the artist.

intend mainly to critique them and our connection to

them? Perhaps this ambiguity between affirmation and

criticism is part of the artists’ goal.”30

The artists in Diabolique appeal to our hearts, minds

and senses. Some are political activists. Others are cap-

tivated by nightmarish experiences, terror and horror,

the links between weapons and toys. Still others wish

to illuminate the mistakes of the past, admitting guilt,

without guaranteeing or even requesting forgiveness.

Perhaps the contemporary art in Diabolique gathers

together symbolic wars that partake of struggle and car-

nival—battles that bring people together before divisive

yet collective weaknesses for atrocity. These artists are

“best positioned to affect our knowledge by confronting

us with a synthesis of new and often shocking realities.”31

Like the poetry of Aime Cesaire, these visual works of art

embody and illuminate blood, pain, fury, rage, destruction,

protest, and outcry.32They are also talismans, memorials,

(anti-)monuments, and shrines. Lest we forget.

Amanda Cachia was employed at the Dunlop Art Gallery from

2007–2010, where she most recently held the position of Director/

Curator. She is currently pursuing a Masters in Visual and Critical

Studies from the California College of the Arts in San Francisco.

This essay originally appeared in the exhibition catalogue for

Diabolique. It appears here in edited form to reflect the exhibi-

tion’s presentation at Oakville Galleries.

1 Clayton Eshleman & Annette Smith, Translated with an Introduc-

tion and Notes by, The Collected Poetry: Aime Cesaire, University

of California Press: Berkeley, Los Angeles, London, 1983, p. 2912 According to a CBC report from November, 2006, Saskatchewan

had more homicides per capita than any other province in 2005,

according to figures released by Statistics Canada. The federal

agency examined police reports for the year and tallied up 43 cases

of murder, manslaughter or infanticide in the province. That

gave it a rate of 4.33 homicides per 100,00 people — double the

national average of 2.04 homicides per 100,000 people. 3 www.dick

shovel.com/covertwar.html (Accessed June 20, 2009) 4 Fred

Moten, “Black Mo’nin” in Loss, edited by David L. Eng and David

Kazanjian, 2003, Regents of the University of California, p. 595 www.stonechildinquiry.ca (Accessed June 20, 2009) 6 Amanda

Cachia, Foreword, Diabolique, 2009, Regina, SK: Dunlop Art Gallery,

p. X 7 Gertrude Kearns in “The Art of War: Steeped in modern

conflict, artist portrays historic warriors”, by Anthony Reinhart,

The Globe and Mail, October 29, 2008, p. A7 8 L Gen. Romeo

Dallaire, Shake Hands With The Devil: The Failure of Humanity in

Rwanda, 2003, Canada: Random House, p. 7 9 Sylvie Blocher,

“Working With Them …” in Living Pictures: Wo/Men in Uniform

by Sylvie Blocher, 2008, Regina, SK: Dunlop Art Gallery, p. 1910 Norman Rosenthal, Apocalypse: Beauty and Horror in Contem-

porary Art, Royal Academy of Arts: London, 2000, p. 22 11 Philip

Monk, “Violence and Representation” in Struggles with the Image,

1988, Toronto: YYZ Books, p. 29 12 Susan Sontag, Regarding the

Pain of Others, 2003, New York: Picador Press, p. 40 13 James E.

Young, “Foreword: Looking Into the Mirrors of Evil” in Mirroring

Evil: Nazi Imagery / Recent Art, 2002, New York: Jewish Museum,

p. xvi 14 Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Un-

making of the World, New York: Oxford University Press, 1985,

p. 3 15 Norman Rosenthal, Apocalypse: Beauty and Horror in

Contemporary Art, London: Royal Academy of Arts, 2000, p. 1916 Laura Cottingham, The War is Always Home: Martha Rosler,

1991 (catalogue essay) http://home.earthlink.net/~navva/reviews/

cottingham.html (Accessed July 10, 2009) 17 Miriam Hansen,

“Why Media Æsthetics?” Critical Inquiry, 30 (Winter 2004): 39318 http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090617/ap_on_re_mi_ea/ml_iran

_election_media_2 (Accessed June 26, 2009) 19 ibid. 20 Toni

Burlap, “The Euclidean Triangle” in Whitney Biennial 2006: Day

For Night, New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 2006,

p. 42 21 Gregory Sholette, Snip, Snip … Bang, Bang: Political Art,

Reloaded, www.gregorysholette.com/writings/writing_index.html

(Accessed June 20, 2009) 22 Leslie Cagan, “Reflections on

feminism, war, and the politics of dissent” in Feminism and War:

Confronting U.S. Imperialism, edited by Robin L. Riley, Chandra

Talpade Mohanty, and Minnie Bruce Pratt, London and New York:

Zed Books, 2008, p.252 23 Ibid., 252. 24 ebounce@mailer.e-flux.com

and www.exitart.org (Dated December 2007/January 2008) 25 Our

world is a media-saturated one — we no longer have to ‘imagine’

what it would be like to be in a warzone, because our lives revolve

around the imaginary world of cinema and film instead. Susan

Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others, 2003, p. 22 26 Baudrillard,

Simulacra and Simulation, 1994, Ann Arbor: The University of

Michigan Press, p. 79 27 Sontag, Susan, Regarding the Pain of

Others, 2003, New York: Picador, p. 41 28 Laszlo Buhasz, “Travel-

ling to the dark side” in The Globe and Mail, November 2, 200829 Many other exhibitions around the world have addressed the

theme of war as crucible for exploration. That Was Then … This is

Now at P.S.1, New York, 2008, curated by Director Alanna Heiss

was divided into three core themes of Flags,Weapons and Dreams;

Signals in the Dark: Art in the Shadow of War, 2008, was curated

by Seamus Kealy for Blackwood Gallery, Mississauga, Toronto;

Robert Storr’s Venice Biennale, Think with the Senses—Feel with

the Mind: Art in the Present Tense, 2007; Brave New Worlds, was

co-curated by Doryun Chong and Yasmil Raymond for the Walker

Art Center, Minneapolis, 2007–2008; War Zones, was co-curated

by Karen Henry and Karen Love, 1999 at Presentation House,

Vancouver; numerous Whitney Biennials in New York, and At War,

Og2 Oakville Galleries 13

for the Centre de Cultura Contemporania de Barcelona, Spain,

was curated by a team composed of Antonio Monegal, Francesc

Torres and Jose Maria Ridao in 2004. Reaching back further

historically, the exhibition A Different War was produced by the

Whatcom Museum of History and Art in 1990 and circulated by

ICI across the U.S. It was accompanied by a catalogue with text

by Lucy R. Lippard. This exhibition was the first critical exami-

nation of the impact of the Vietnam War on American art of the

past twenty-five years since 1990. 30 “While this work may

seem offensive on the surface, the artist may also ask, is the

imagery itself that offends, or is it the artists’ æsthetic manip-

ulations of such imagery? Does such art become a victim of

the imagery it depicts? Or does it tap into and thereby exploit

the repugnant power of diabolic imagery as a way to merely

shock and move its viewers? Or is it both? Perhaps we need

to become aware of our motives for gazing on such art, or our

own need to look evil in the face even as we are repelled by what

we see …” James E. Young, “Foreword: Looking into the Mir-

rors of Evil”, in Mirroring Evil: Nazi Imagery / Recent Art, curat-

ed by Norman L. Kleeblatt, 2002, New York: Jewish Museum,

p. xvii 31 Norman Rosenthal, Apocalypse: Beauty and Horror in

Contemporary Art, London: Royal Academy of Arts, 2000, p. 2232 Sunera Thobani, War Frenzy, Centre for Research on Global-

ization, 28 October 2001.

The presentation of this exhibition has been made possible in

part through a contribution from the Department of Canadian

Heritage.

Og2 Oakville Galleries 14