January 30, 2005
Theatre of Terror
When Chechen guerilla freedom fighters took 900 hostages during a Moscow performance of the Western style musical Nord Ost in 2002, what struck the artist Catherine Sullivan was that not only had the terrorists hijacked the theatre, they had hijacked the actual symbolic value of the show as well. Sullivan set about to try and figure out the total profound implication of the attack which many Russians saw as their own 911. It struck her that so many different histories of cultural trauma were colliding at once. There was the original story the musical was based on which was a kind of heroic adventure epic set at the turn of last century, itself a combination of Russian nationalism and western colonial mythology. There was the fact that such a story had been remade as a Broadway type spectacle, and there was the brutal reality of the Chechen rebel confrontation with Russian Black Ops and the plight of the hostages, 129 of whom died when the police chose to raid the theatre with poison nerve gas. For Sullivan the question was how to express such a vast spectrum of trauma employing solely the conventions of theatre. The outcome was Ice Floes of Franz Joseph Land (2004) now on display at the Zürich Kunsthalle. For some time now the artist has enjoyed turning our most cherished and idealized forms of cultural expression on their head in complex multi-channel videos that mine the spectacle of theatre.