REVIEW

Evil Eye:
The Parallel History Of Optics And Ballistics

First published by Art Monthly, June 2023

In the anxious early months of 2022, amid the advances of Russia’s illegal invasion into Ukraine, global news channels were routinely seduced by sensational footage of doubtful origin. Purporting to document nerve-racking offensives, such as the covert manoeuvres of a mythic Ukrainian pilot, under closer scrutiny these clips were revealed to be simulations rendered with video-game software, strategically seeded into the media-sphere for ambiguous yet undeniably propagandistic purposes.

The ubiquity of this footage, and the ease with which it could permeate, destabilise or enhance narratives surrounding an unfolding conflict, marked a concentration of the ‘military-entertainment complex’; that co-constitutive feedback loop that delivers mutual benefits for both the leisure industries and the armed forces. Such alarming evolutions of the relationship between warfare and the technologies of perception are, however, only the latest iteration of a long and well-documented lineage. In his lyrically vertiginous 1986 book War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception, Paul Virilio outlines the ‘fatal interdependence’ of martial and cinematic visuality, suggesting that the scopic regimes of new imaging technologies – from aerial reconnaissance to the science-fictive anticipation of laser warfare – have collapsed the relationship between sight and lethality, subjecting the world to a form of ‘factitious topology’ in which one’s proximity to conditions of visibility, opacity or occlusion might form a new dynamics of power and vulnerability.   

That such postulations now map so seamlessly onto our ambient experiences of data privacy, surveillance capitalism and ‘predictive’ racialised policing provided ‘Evil Eye: The Parallel History of Optics and Ballistics’, curated by Ana Teixeira Pinto and Oier Etxeberria Bereziartua, a bitter and truly disquieting relevance. Bringing museological display into enlightening contiguities with contemporary art practice, this group exhibition featuring works by Zach Blas, Rajkamal Kahlon and Prabhakar Pachpute amongst others, sought to illustrate how optical developments in lens-based media have historically segued with the science of projectile flight into the creation of a ‘total war’ scenario that naturalises new forms of political subjection or, to use the curators’ own bracing terminology (echoing Achille Mbembe), necropolitical ‘death worlds’ in which the apprehending gaze of weaponised vision erodes the very possibility of life.           

This relationship was embodied by a menacing artefact in the show’s opening display, the Zenit Fotosnaiper: a Soviet-era SLR camera fitted onto a rifle stock. Developed for military use in the 1940s, this chimeric object formed a curatorial shorthand encapsulating the exhibition’s complex themes. The concept of the ‘photogun’ partly finds it origins in the ‘chronophotographic gun’ developed by film pioneer Étienne-Jules Marie, whose scrutiny of sequential imagery formed possibly the earliest instance of cinema reconfigured as a forensic and extractive technology. Marie’s prototype cameras, developed with Lucian Bull to capture previously unseen motion, were also on display. Overlooking this vitrine was a stately photographic work by Kiluanji Kia Henda, The Conquest of The Kingdom Without Memory (with Jeanne Rolande), 2023, an experiment in political portraiture that positioned the Senegalese-Spanish activist Jeanne Rolande within the opulent corridors of San Sebastián’s City Hall. Clutching a large sheaf of pampas grass while adopting a pose and wearing attire that suggested both mourning rituals and military parade pomp, the piece established a defiant optics of resistance while echoing the histories of botanical colonialism and human enslavement that have contributed to the city’s prosperity.

Natascha Sadr Haghighian’s film Vice/virtue, 2001, animated a simple transition between two line drawings of a spot-lit prison courtyard and a foot-lit theatrical stage, provoking questions of a now generalised panopticism in the tangled confusion of each drawings’ metamorphosis. A similar embrace of illusion’s destabilising play was present in Kapwani Kiwanga’s quietly narrated slideshow Novaya Zemlya, 2015/23, which unearthed the history of the first recorded solar mirage by Dutch pioneer Gerrit de Veer during an ill-fated expedition to map the northeast passage in 1597. Kiwanga reframed the story, foregrounding the space of embodied perception against the tools of mechanised measurement (clocks, compasses) that have enforced the violence of standardisation and mechanical subjection; a modernising process that would find its awful culmination in the detonation of the world’s most powerful nuclear weapon at the same Arctic location in 1961. More immediately affronting, however, was Kiwanga’s sculpture Glow #11, 2020, an angular monolith in black marble inlaid with a distressingly bright LED that alludes to the New York Police Department’s terroristic practice of illuminating inner-city housing blocks with 24-hour daylight lamps under the guise of acts of alleged ‘surveillance’.

Haig Aivazian’s They May Own the Lanterns but We Have the Light, Episode 1, 2020, transposed similar reflections on weaponised illumination into the plasmatic dreamworlds of monochromatic animation. Riffing on animation’s aptitude for joyful formlessness, the film re-animated scenes from cult cartoons to make its own hyper-kinetic celebration in which nocturnal confrontations between ghosts and cops were presented as a dramatic, eternal battle between solidity and fluidity. While lucid video essays by Miranda Pennell and Ho Rui An surveyed the ghostly imprints of documentary imagery in the construction of both historical and economic fictions, a truly striking film by Killuanji Kia Henda employed phantasms to more visceral ends with his Phantom Pain – A Letter To Henry A Kissinger, 2020. Narrating a history of US interventionism in the artist’s native Angola, the film suggested that the former US secretary of defence might – much like the many Angolan victims of anti-personnel landmines who encounter the pain of a ‘phantom limb’ – be haunted by the phantom pain of his own ‘amputated soul’. Cruel, yes certainly, but also apparently just words.

Perhaps the most pressing instance of this show’s unfettered urgency was, paradoxically, an archival display by researcher Germán Labrador, who has traced the hostile imaginaries of aerial bombardment and the fascist poetics of bodily disassembly from the Spanish Rif War in Morocco of 1921–26 through FT Marinetti’s 1928 futurist provocations in Bilbao, the subsequent personality cults of aviatory heroism following Franco’s intrusion into the Basque Region during the Spanish Civil War to the transmission of ‘whole earth’ imagery from the Madrid Deep Space Communication Complex taken in 1968. Philosopher Peter Sloterdijk once characterised control of the firmament – through both chemical and incendiary weaponry and the peculiar optics of habitable biomes – as a ‘terror from the air’, a distinctly modern dissemination of power distributed at the level of the atmospheric. As our newsfeeds continue to blur satellite imagery charting the aerial destruction of Mariupol, Marinka and Odesa via the calibrated optics of increasingly strained international diplomacy, it feels chilling but entirely appropriate to suggest that the various works comprising ‘Evil Eye’ may not simply embody an exhibition, but an essential tactical playbook for navigating and narrating the terminal optics of a now ubiquitous state of war.