CV115 - Mary Kavanagh, Daughters of Uranium — Blake Fitzpatrick
Ciel variable 115 - The March of the World (Summer 2020)
Portfolio (Individual Article, Digital Version)
Mary Kavanagh, Daughters of Uranium
Embodied Politics | La politique incarnée
By Blake Fitzpatrick
Drawing on literature, including works by Paul Virilio and Allan Sekula, Blake Fitzpatrick positions the works by Mary Kavanagh resulting from her visit to the Trinity Site, where the atom bomb was developed, within a critique of the history of armaments. The idea of air as a commons that has turned deadly and political is borrowed from Peter Sloterdijk’s analysis of the inception of “atmoterrorism” – the gases used during the First World War. For her part, Kavanagh evokes airborne diseases resulting from the toxicity of nuclear fallout. Both exhibitions that Fitzpatrick critiques “build connections between nuclear history and its lived effects.” Through photographic archives, videos, watercolours, and objects, the exhibitions cover a wide range of evidence, from trinitite to lead 206, the final element in uranium’s decay chain, reminding us that “in the nuclear era we are all guinea pigs.”
Details
Language: French & English
Digital file: PDF, 4.5 Mb
Bibliographical Reference
Blake Fitzpatrick, « Mary Kavanagh, Daughters of Uranium &mdash Embodied Politics », Ciel variable, no 115, « La marche du monde », Montréal, 2020, p. 32-41.