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OPERATION ATROPOS by Coco Fusco.

opening night 13 June 6-9 pm

22 Parfett St

London

E1 1JR



The exhibition runs from 17 June to 30 July open 1-6 Saturday and Sunday

and by appointment



http://www.elastic.org.uk/futexh

for full details



check the New York Times Article about the work



http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/30/arts/design/30fusc.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

or if you dont want to sign up see below



Coco Fusco, born and based in New York is a interdisciplinary

artist and writer and is one of the most significant and influential

performance and video-artists (also an articulate and outspoken

theoretician, as well as an active curator).  She deals with issues

such as globalisation, gender-specific conflicts, cultural colonisation

and intercultural theory and practice. Her work is an ongoing

reflection on the conditions of (women's) bodies in globalising and

technologically imbued environments.



She has performed, lectured, exhibited and curated around the world

since 1988. She is the author of English is Broken Here (The New

Press,1995), The Bodies That Were Not Ours and Other Writings

(Routledge/inIVA, 2001) and the editor of Corpus Delecti: Performance

Art of the Americas (Routledge, 1999) and Only Skin Deep: Changing

Visions of the American Self (Abrams, 2003).



Fusco’s recent art projects combine electronic media and performance in

a variety of formats, from staged multi-media performances

incorporating large scale projections and closed circuit television to

live performances streamed to the internet that invite audiences to

chart the course of action through chat interaction.  Her works have

been included in such events as The Whitney Biennial, Sydney Biennale,

The Johannesburg Biennial, The Kwangju Biennale, The Shanghai Biennale

and VideoBrasil.



ELASTIC RESIDENCE is a non-profit gallery space for projects and

durational performance.  It is an artist-run space established in 2004,

aimed at giving artists dealing with challenging contemporary material,

direct access to exhibiting opportunities.



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http://www.elastic.org.uk

0207 247 1375

Critic's Notebook

 Coco Fusco's 'Operation Atropos': Fantasy Interrogation, Real Tension

Coco Fusco



By HOLLAND COTTER



Published: May 30, 2006





 To some people political art means protest art: slogan-slinging,

name-calling, didacticism, an unaesthetic thing. But in the

trauma-riddled early 21st century, after 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina,

with a continuing war in Iraq, political art can be something else: a

mirror.

Readers’ Opinions

Forum: Artists and Exhibitions





At White Columns in Chelsea, the artist Harrell Fletcher has

photographically reconstituted a museum display he saw on a visit to Ho

Chi Minh City last year. The pictures in the original display

documented the Vietnam War — known in Vietnam as the American War —

as seen from a Vietnamese perspective. Mr. Fletcher presents the images

as he found them. They are beyond horrific.



New paintings by Jenny Holzer at Cheim & Read in Chelsea are silkscreen

reproductions of recently declassified United States government

documents related to Abu Ghraib prison and to the detention center in

Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and to interrogation procedures used at both.

The words, unaltered except for magnification, add up to a stupefying

archive of official violence.



Interrogation is also the subject of "Operation Atropos," a new video

by Coco Fusco, which makes its East Coast debut tonight at the City

University of New York Graduate Center. (The screening accompanies the

center's exhibition "Image War: Contesting Images of Political

Conflict," organized by the Whitney Independent Study Program.)



The idea for the video began when Ms. Fusco, an interdisciplinary

artist who teaches at Columbia University, was preparing a performance

piece in which she assumed the character of a female interrogator at

Abu Ghraib. She realized that to continue the work, she needed training

in interrogation techniques. Through an Internet search she found a

source of instruction: the Prisoner of War Interrogation Resistance

Program run by a private concern called Team Delta, based in

Philadelphia.



 The organizers of the program are former members of the United States

Intelligence Agency and self-described specialists in the "psychology

of capture." In its original form the course was used to train elite

soldiers to resist interrogation if captured, and to extract

information from political prisoners. Reconceived for the private

sector — police officers, private security personnel and psychological

researchers are among the clientele — the program is a grueling

four-day immersion in methods of physical and mental persuasion, with

the participants playing both captive and captor.



The course is offered only to groups, so Ms. Fusco solicited volunteers

to join her. Six women, three of them former Columbia students,

accepted the invitation. (It cost about $8,000 for the group; Ms. Fusco

picked up the tab.) She also arranged to have the course videotaped,

with the artist Kambui Olujimi as director of photography.



 As the 50-minute video opens, Ms. Fusco is reading aloud from a

briefing that laid out the ground rules for the ordeal ahead, clearly

amused by the portentous language: "You will experience physical and

psychological pain." The women share a piece of secret information they

will do their best not to reveal under duress.



 The course begins. The women are riding in a van through the woods in

the Poconos when masked men stop them at gunpoint and direct them to

strip to their underwear for a search. The women's clothes are

exchanged for Day-Glo orange coveralls; their heads and faces are

covered with blackout hoods. They are led, handcuffed, through the

woods.



 The make-believe nature of all this is periodically reinforced as

"enemy soldiers" drop out of character to be interviewed about their

work. Even so, a sense of real tension starts to build. Mr. Olujimi's

darting, probing, camera work helps to create it. So does the sustained

image of the women being pushed, prodded, forced to their knees, yelled

at and insulted by the all-male interrogation team.



 At one point, an interrogator explains to the camera that a

particularly effective technique for breaking down resistance is to

make a captive think that unless he or she yields information, another

prisoner will be harmed. When this situation is simulated, one of the

women in the group starts to cry. The psychological pressure is

working. Fiction translates into emotional fact.



 Another woman also starts weeping. But it turns out she is doing so

deliberately, using the ploy of feminine vulnerability to avoid

divulging her secret. The ruse works. Later, when the women are

relaxing after their stint as prisoners, Ms. Fusco confesses that she

had had to stop herself from laughing at some of the dialogue her

interrogators delivered. As the film ends, she and her colleagues take

turns interrogating their former captors, learning to do to others what

has been done to them.



 So what kind of political art is this? It isn't moralizing or

accusatory. It's art for a time when play-acting and politics seem to

be all but indistinguishable. "Operation Atropos" is reality television

with the cracks between reality and artifice showing. It's in the

cracks, Ms. Fusco suggests, that the political truth is revealed.