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Fascination with the [Game of the] Exploding [Historical] Hollow Leg, 1983

This video documents a multimedia installation with performance elements, including a simulated war room. The installation was sited at the University of Colorado, Boulder, near the nuclear weapons production facility of Rocky Flats and the headquarters of the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD), dug into a mountainside in Colorado Springs.

Martha Rosler roughly reproduced a control room with altered maps, material describing nuclear weapons, recruitment posters from the Boulder campus, second-hand military clothing, together with slides of anti-war posters and protest marches in Europe and the United States. She also incorporated a video loop, newspaper collages, an audio tour of NORAD’s headquarters, a library of books on war, as well as various monitors placed on desks from the Rocky Flats Plant showing war videogames, and two giant cargo parachutes deriving from the army. During the exhibition, Rosler worked with students on a performance and lecture on war, and organised a forum on activism and peace. Besides being an openly anti-war statement, the installation is also a critique of nuclear weapons production and macho military systems at a time, 1983, when the Cold War still generated great political tension.


Technical details

Original title:
Fascination with the [Game of the] Exploding [Historical] Hollow Leg
Registration number:
3237
Artist:
Rosler, Martha
Date created:
1983
Date acquired:
2008
Fonds:
MACBA Collection. Barcelona City Council long-term
Object type:
Audiovisual recording
Media:
Single-channel video, color, sound, 58 min 16 s
Credits:
MACBA Collection. Barcelona City Council long-term loan
Copyright:
© Martha Rosler
It has accessibility resources:
No

The MACBA Collection features Catalan, Spanish and international art and, although it includes works from the 1920s onwards, its primary focus is on the period between the 1960s and the present.

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