Gallery 101 launches interactive video game exhibit by artists who grew up in war zones.
The sound of gunfire and shouting filled the room as bombs went off without warning. These sounds which would normally echo through a war zone could be heard from a local art gallery in Centretown last weekend, when Gallery 101 launched a new exhibit called Blown Up: Gaming and War. The free-of-charge exhibit features the videos and games of three artists from countries where war is a real thing, not a form of entertainment.
The curators at Gallery 101 are particularly interested in any kind of art that challenges norms and has an overt political or social message, according to director Laura Margita.
Blown-Up features two interactive video games created by artists Mohammed Mohsen, who made an appearance at the opening, and Wafaa Bilal. The non-interactive video, Serious Games I: Watson is Down, by Harun Farocki, depicts a handful of new recruits in a virtual military training session. Meant to enforce realism, this implies that if they die in the game, they would have died in the field.
Video games are not usually the first to come to mind when thinking of an art gallery. Typically, paintings or sculptures would come first, but Margita says she believes the lines between traditional visual art and media art are being blurred.
“Contemporarily, artists have an idea and then it can go in any direction,” she says, “They just find ways to put it together. So there are a lot of media art or performance (art). I guess form has become more open, more accessible, wider.”
For Saudi Arabian-raised Mohammed Mohsen’s video game, Weak, the player-controlled character is neither a hero nor a villain, and in fact has no iconic identification at all. Mohsen sees video games as a way to examine universal issues, such as misrepresentation and the deconstruction of icons.
“I grew up in the ‘80s, in Saudi Arabia. I grew up under dictatorship,” Mohsen says. “One of the things that weren’t effectively censored was videogames. It was, in a way for me, a space to see the world and a space to see the misrepresentations of Arabs.”
In that respect, video games may not have changed much. In 2003, an online game called Quest for Saddam was released. In six levels, players hunt down the former Iraqi president. In response, al-Qaeda released a modified version that changed the target to former U.S. president George W. Bush.
Iraqi-born Wafaa Bilal presented his version of the game, The Night of Bush Capturing: A Virtual Jihad. The player is Bilal, who after learning that his brother is killed by American soldiers, becomes a suicide bomber on a mission.
Bilal’s game is meant to raise awareness not only of the stereotypical nature of war video games, but what it means to someone whose culture is constantly portrayed as the enemy.
“I wanted to reverse the role from the hunter to the hunted; to put the viewer in a different perspective,” he says, insisting that it shouldn’t be thought of as an anti-American game. “The job of the artist is not to make a statement, but to build a platform.”
Bilal’s platform, along with Mohsen and Farocki’s, will remain on display until the exhibit closes on March 2.