All the Images looked Real <2019>
video 6' 42"
the artwork is in endless draft mode
The video stems out of a long engagement in Khalili’s practice with the question of the archive in the digital age. Not any archive, but an archive of a calamity. The questions addressed in the work are concerned with the exhibition of the material corpse of a catastrophe as evidence, as the undeniable truth. Would it be more appropriate in order to save the memory of this catastrophe to hide it's material evidence and tell the stories orally? Where these stories mutate and are combined with ongoing catastrophes. Potentially the digital archive could be the medium with which this happens; through the dispersal of copies and their endless modification, memory is emancipated from the narrative of the institution. The existence of the archive in cyberspace reveals it's fictive character.
In the video the desktop becomes the landscape which the camera shoots and maneuvers in. We only see the image of the world mediated by the screen. The video attempts to reveal this mediated image, we see the image of the image of the image, until we are unsure if there is an ‘original’ image of the world. The form which the video takes works hand in hand with the issue of the copy that is addressed.
