The Theatre of War - Stanislava Pinchuk

Perimeter Editions, ISBN 9781922545343,
Pb, 168 pgs, 16 x 24cm
Acqn. 36293
In Stock

£36.00
Ukrainian soldiers engage in intensive combat training at an unmarked location; a female choir rehearse in a Sarajevo theatre once used to stage defiant performances during the Bosnian War; youths gather at Homer’s Tomb on the Greek island of Ios, a span of the Mediterranean through which asylum seekers make their treacherous journeys. Published as a visual translation of her major three-channel moving image work The Theatre of War, Stanislava Pinchuk’s first book with Perimeter Editions recasts the opening lines of Homer’s epic poem the Iliad across geography, history, language, and the throes of current armed conflict. As with much of the Sarajevo-based, Ukrainian-Australian artist’s work, the film and its translation into book form, work to map the contours of global conflict with great sensitivity, poeticism, and unexpected beauty. Here, she weaves together three charged performances which draw on the oral and folk traditions from which the Iliad evolved; just as the poem contains many gruesome descriptions of death on the battlefield, so do these performers focus our attention on both the life-force and vulnerability of bodies in contemporary theatres of war.