Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art
Feminist Art Base: Andrea Bowers

Eulogies to One and Another (Installation view)

Andrea Bowers. Eulogies to One and Another (Installation view), 2006.

Description:
This series of text-based drawings address the deaths of 28-year old activist Marla Ruzicka and her Iraqi co-worker Faiz Ali Salim. They were killed in a car bombing incident in Iraq in April, 2005. Ruzicka had been the founder of the organization CIVIC, Campaign for Innocent Victims in Conflict, which had been working on a census of innocent victims from the Afghanistan and Iraqi wars and trying to raise money from the American Government for the victims' families. Composed of eulogies downloaded from the Internet, the authorial sources of the texts range from journalists, politicians, military personnel, war historians, Iraqis, and NGO workers. Created almost in the spirit of photographic negatives, the text remains white while the negative space has been meticulously shaded a medium gray. In the first set of drawings, the eulogies have been enlarged and rendered in their entirety - including text and images. The second set of drawings is a duplicate of the first, however only those passages referencing Faiz Ali Salim are illustrated. Through this editing process a hidden agenda of privilege is revealed. Bowers' aestheticization of the dull form of an Internet document visually illustrates her concern with the temporal and impermanent nature of Internet information.

Medium:
Drawing

Tags:
activism, drawing, Marla Ruzicka, Faiz Ali Salim, Iraq