Apocolocyntosis is a photo-based instillation in which large black and white photographs of a figure reenacting various poses, of dead soldiers found on the battlefields of the Second World War, are positioned on the walls and white clothes are arranged on three birch plywood boxes.

The work consists of ten photographs, which are printed at 50”x65”. The photos show a gleaming white figure of a man in various poses isolated on a deep black ground, all of which are reenactments of poses of dead soldiers extracted from photograph in the World War II Archive. The photographs are hung at different heights, spacings from each other and orientations in a constalation of sorts. The work is also presented with three birch plywood boxes pushed together to create a fractured geometric form strewn with white clothing (a t-shirt, a button-down and trousers).

Taking its title from Apocolocyntosis (divi) Claudii of Seneca the Younger — a satire on the Roman emperor Claudius and the apotheosis by which dead Roman emperors were recognized as gods — my work Apocolocyntosis also takes a critical view of apotheosis, though in this case that of soldiers, both by piggy-backing on the intertextual link of the title and by a displaced reenactment of state ideology.

The work takes on the techniques and aesthetics of theatre and tableaux-vivant to re-articulate the state’s para-religious system of representation which performs apotheosis upon the dead soldiers, essentially queering this system to create works in which the mechanisms of the construction of glory are visible, so that the work may act as a catalyst for the viewer’s thoughts about the construction of the work and therefor its subject, state enacted apotheosis.