"Seeing those photos from the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, I decided I was looking at the perfect conflation of two constituents of Julia Kristeva's 'Abject': Horror and the Female. Every theater of war requires specific armory, and now America has produced a narrowly targeted new weapon, incorporating a kind of 'vagina dentata', designed to inflict maximum psychological damage in traditional societies." Russian/Dutch artist Bee Flowers has a new (NSFW) show at the Moscow Museum of Modern Art. See also Megastructure, Soviet Sublime, and much more.
posted on Mar 11, 2007 - View this thread

Last week a video was posted to YouTube and linked to by the Iraqslogger site. The YouTube account ("Deathlyillington") is now defunct but the video survives and purports to show a former guard from Abu Ghraib talking about torture techniques employed at the American-run prison. The man recounts the gang rape of a female teenage detainee, in which one guard "pimped" the girl to others for $50 each. As he recalls, "I think at the end of the day he'd made like 500 bucks before she hung herself." The US Army's Criminal Investigation Department has now launched an investigation, but the question remains, is the video real, or is it a hoax along the lines of Jesse Macbeth, the Daily Mirror fake torture photos or the fake beheading video. The video contains few clues to the identity of the alleged soldier, who is shown in silhouette but seems potentially recognizable. A transcript is available.
posted on Feb 1, 2007 - View this thread