Klemens Gasser & Tanja Grunert, Inc.
“Reading Capital & Container”
In a global ecosystem that is fed by the constant repetition of a select few images, Tomic reconstructs the images, the life, as seen when stripped of the lustre provided, maintained, by global corporations. Tomic shows us the unseen, not only in the sense of what is denied to us visually, but what is denied intellectually and spiritually.
Tomic’s Reading Capital (2005) is a realization of Sergej Eisenstein’s concept of a screen adaptation of Karl Marx’s Capital. Tomic persuaded respected 'Capitalists' from San Antonio, Texas to recite passages excerpted from the work. The 'intellectual montage' is intended to generate a mental image arising from the filmed representation that reveals the antagonistic contradictions in society and the 'laws' of capitalism as the dominant logic in life.
This logic extends to the governing and flow of goods in CONTAINER (2005). The container signifies not only the transport of goods, but of people—Mexicans being shipped into the USA illegally, or the bodies of murder victims freighted for disposal, as in the Serbian war, or prisoners of war denied the rights protected under the Geneva Convention. CONTAINER (2005) reconstructs a crime, a massacre overseen by American soldiers in Afghanistan. Economy has reduced people to the status of goods and, they are treated as such. They are used-up and then disposed of.