Comments about Thomas Hirschhorn's 'Incommensurable Banner' from the Fabrica comments book:
"It's interesting how easy it is to become inured to the suffering of others when viewing a block of images such as these and the others in the University gallery. Photography's failure is how it distances you from suffering whilst pulling you close. There is no 'bodily' contact. The record is away and other, these are other people. The presentation of this work in a sort of discotheque of colour lessens the specialness of each individual event. This won't stop now. That would be naive to think. People are resilient and can learn to cope with all sorts of events, perhaps that is why we will continue to experience and perpetrate aggressive events such as war."
"Although this piece is indeed shocking and extreme I feel it does not so much highlight the suffering inflicted by war as create a gallery of gore that appeals to the dark, voyeuristic side of our nature, that which compels us to slow down when we pass a car accident. We are horrified by what we see, yet we cannnot turn away. We are constantly bombarded by the media reports of bombings and suicide attacks, 'friendly fire incidents' and ghosts of past war atrocities yet we do not allow the victims of these awful events to rest easy, to dredge up these images and display them to an audience which has (largely) never experienced the sorrow of conflict firsthand, an audience who will recoil in horror and make offhand statements about the transience of life and exclaim 'what is the point of it all?' before going to lunch, making light jokes about what they have seen is not a respectful treatment of the dead. Would we respond in the same way if it were images of OUR loved ones splashed across the banner? Would we pace up and down in respectful silence, contemplating all the evil occurring in far flung corners of the world, brought to us safely anaesthetised through the medium of our televisions and the omni-net? No. We would fall to our knees and we would wail."
