10.6—1.7.2016
THOMAS GALLER
WEEK END, 2008
ALL FOOTAGE COLLECTED FROM YOUTUBE, ORIGINALLY RECORDED BY U. S. SOLDIERS IN AFGHANISTAN AND IRAQ VIDEO, COLOR, STEREO SOUND, 17:17
For over 10 years now Thomas Galler has been drawing on the collective Western visual memory, especially our murky relationship with the iconography of war, counterculture and tabloids, summoning a wide-range of sources that include documentary, fiction, official images, and found footage.
In Week End (a reference to the 1967 Godard film that is deeply stamped by the Vietnam War), Galler appropriates videos shot by U.S. soldiers on their smartphones during their free time while in Iraq or Afghanistan. Hip hop lip-synch and dance sessions, freestyle verbal fights, parodies of the balance of power between officers and grunts, stupid dares, and other behaviors that are hard to interpret punctuate some kind of aimless wandering, revealing a boredom, a latency, and a need to prove one’s existence that achieves a sublime intensity, though more often a deep void.
Born in Baden (CH) in 1970. Lives and works in Zürich.
