Christopher Sims
Selected By: Pippa Oldfield, Curator,
Impressions Gallery,
Bradford,
United Kingdom |
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Theater of War:
The Pretend Villages of Iraq and Afghanistan
Christopher Sims’s images reveal a surreal world that
is at once fake and also disturbingly real, a world both
Western and Islamic, banal and horrific, high-tech
and tawdry. These simulated Afghan and Iraqi villages,
located deep within the forests of the American South
and the deserts of California, are used as military training
environments to orient U.S. soldiers prior to deployment.
Remote sites of war have been spectacularly relocated
from “over there” to “over here.”
Mr. Sims eschews both the conventional war photography
of the Capa-esque heroic photojournalist close
to the action and the more contemplative approach of
“late photography” depicting the aftermath of conflict,
exemplified by photographers from Roger Fenton to
Simon Norfolk. Instead he takes the viewer backstage to
the “war on terror,” revealing how it has been reframed
as a dramatic entertainment with actors and audience.
In these fictitious lands of “Talatha” and “Braggistan,”
scriptwriters work behind the scenes to dramatize
training scenarios in which a suicide bomber detonates
herself outside a mosque and American soldiers
negotiate with a reluctant mayor. The only blood spilled
here is fake, and participants wear halters with electronic
sensors that monitor hits, transforming combat into
a kind of paintball-type game without consequences.
Recent immigrants fleeing Iraq and Afghanistan are employed
to play displaced and fictitious versions of themselves,
while amputee veterans from U.S. wars in Vietnam
and Korea take the roles of the wounded. At times even
Christopher Sims himself is obliged to play a part, acting
as a photojournalist for the fictitious “International
News Network.”
A former photo-archivist for the United States Holocaust
Memorial Museum, Washington, D.C., Christopher Sims
is acutely aware of the importance of collecting images
for the future, and his work anticipates the “missing”
subjects of a war archive yet to be created. His object
is to reveal “manifestations of the American understanding
of what it means to be at war” and to consider how
they might be articulated photographically. Theater of
War dramatically calls into question the status of the
war photographer as an objective observer, as well as
the canon of war photography and the authenticity of
the photographic document.
- Pippa Oldfield
BIOGRAPHY
Christopher Sims was born in Michigan and grew up in Atlanta.
He received a B.A. in history from Duke University, Durham,
North Carolina, a M.A. in visual communication from the University
of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and a M.F.A. in studio
art from the Maryland Institute College of Art, Baltimore. He
worked as a photo archivist at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial
Museum in Washington, D.C., and currently teaches photography
at Duke University. His work has been exhibited at the
Griffin Museum of Photography, Winchester, Massachusetts; at
the Houston Center for Photography; in North Carolina at the
Light Factory, Charlotte, and the Southeastern Center for Contemporary
Art, Winston-Salem; and at the Halsey Institute of
Contemporary Art at the College of Charleston, South Carolina.
His recent project on Guantanamo Bay was featured in The
Washington Post, the BBC World Service, Roll Call.com, and
Flavorwire.com. He is represented by Ann Stewart Fine Art in
Chapel Hill and Civilian Art Projects in Washington, D.C.