SPACES is closed MARCH 3 - MARCH 28 for install New Exhibitions open March 29 @6PM and April 12 @6PM. Follow @SPACESCLE on IG

November 17 - December 8, 2006

KCAPUT

Sreshta Premnath (New York, NY)

Part of SPACElab

In KCAPUT (read C crossed out), Sreshta Premnath forces a juxtaposition, a slippage. Caput in Latin means head, Kaput in German means destroyed, over, and broken. A kind of verbal decapitation signaled by the crossing of the C is explored by the photographic diptych in the installation. Both images are derived from press photos, one of Al Zarquawi holding Nick Berg's decapitated head in his fist, the other, a more recent image of US officers holding a framed photograph of Al Zarquawi's dead visage. A strange reversal has occurred here. The US press has deployed the very rhetoric it chastises, by anesthetizing its decapitation through photographic cropping and framing.

This emblem of disembodiment and reversal becomes the central motif through which Premnath explores issues of de-contextualization and the empty signifier: an emblem which gathers meaning only through the staging of its image repertoire.

(mixed-media installation with screen printed panels)

About the Artist

Sreshta Premnath

Sreshta Rit Premnath (1979, Bangalore) is an interdisciplinary artist and educator based in New York.He completed his BFA at The Cleveland Institute of Art (2003), his MFA at Bard College (2006), and attended the Whitney Independent Study Program (2008). In 2009 he attended Skowhegan; in 2011 he received the Art... go to artist page

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