Who experiences war as real? With the aestheticising of war’s catastrophic effects, one falls into an amnesic trance, a realm of virtual (non-) responsibility. 00Island became Artists-at-War, embedded for two weeks within various sides’ military during armed conflicts between 2014-2019. 00Island staged interventions both within those military settings and on left-behind battlefields. 00Island recently installed a set of toggle switches labelled ‘guns’ and ‘bombs’, tempting the audience to convert the Null Island gallery space into an apocalyptic control room from which to wage an invisible war. It is precisely the rules of the game of the hyper-realistic, the room for manoeuvre, the opportunities, and the absurdities in this broken-away reality that 00Island tries to tackle and lay bare with ‘Artists-at-War’. [NullIsland Zürich, 2014–2019 / 2020]
