Edmund Clark, Cosmopolemos
Cosmopolemos [Embedded]: Representations of American Military Power from 9/11 to the Evacuation of Kabul
Cosmopolemos is an exploration of knowledge and meaning in relation to an overwhelming edifice of power: the $6.5 trillion worth of contracts issued by the US Defense Department to the private sector between the 9/11 attacks and the American withdrawal from Afghanistan 20 years later. The items accounted for between these two iconic events encompass every aspect of life and death, from oil reserves and nuclear weapons to cookies and cleaning services: over 43 million recorded transactions, with contractors large and small.
These corporate relationships underpin the military hegemony of the world’s foremost superpower. They aren’t secret. But their scale and complexity challenges understanding. We decided to interrogate this complexity using a traditional, now redundant form: the printed encyclopaedia. For centuries, humans have grappled with their imperfect knowledge of the universe, harnessing the encyclopaedia form to portray inconceivable complexity between two covers. In combining the transaction data with the Pentagon’s soft focus photography of American military power, this encyclopaedia offers a representation of everything the US military paid for everywhere.
Embedded comprises a selection - by Katy Barron, PhotoOxford Director, and artist Edmund Clark - of images from the Incite Project made between 9/11 and the evacuation of Kabul, including by photojournalists embedded with the US military in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Instagram: @edmund_clark
Instagram: @inciteproject
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Crofton Black is a writer and investigator. He works as an investigative reporter and editor at Lighthouse Reports where he specialises in the surveillance technology industry. Before that he worked at The Bureau of Investigative Journalism, focusing on military contracting, social media disinformation and AI systems. He spent 10 years uncovering aspects of the CIA's secret detention operations in Europe and elsewhere, leading to landmark litigation in the European Court of Human Rights -- work which he documented in his previous award-winning collaboration with Edmund Clark, "Negative Publicity: Artefacts of Extraordinary Rendition". He holds a PhD in the History of Philosophy from the Warburg Institute, on the topic of medieval and Renaissance theories of cognition. He is a qualified instructor with Fujian White Crane Kung Fu, graded at 2nd Dan by the Chinese Wushu Sports Association.
Edmund Clark links history, politics and representation through photography, video, documents, found images and installation. Recurring themes are experiences, spaces and systems of control and power in contemporary conflict and other contexts. Subjects include extraordinary rendition and the CIA secret detention programme, detention at the US Naval Base Guantanamo Bay, and UK government anti-terrorism procedures. Clark spent five years as artist-in-residence in HM Prison Grendon, Europe’s only wholly therapeutic prison for violent and sexually violent offenders. He has published and been exhibited widely, including solo museum exhibitions at the International Center of Photography Museum, New York, the Imperial War Museum, London, and Zephyr Raum für Fotografie, Reiss-Engelhorn-Museen, Mannheim. Awards include the Royal Photographic Society Hood Medal and an honorary fellowship, the British Journal of Photography International Photography Award and, with Crofton Black, an ICP Museum Infinity Award and Rencontres d’Arles Photo-Text Book Award. He has a PhD by Published Work and is Reader in the Political Image at the University of the Arts London.ription text goes here
CrOFton Black & EDMUND CLARK
Cosmopolemos + Incite Project
Pembroke College
JCR Art Gallery
5 Brewer St,
Oxford.
OX1 1QN
25 October–16 November
Wednesday, Thursday, Friday 4pm–7pm
Saturday and Sunday 11am–5pm
