//ApostolosZerdevas
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Was born in Athens. He studied photography in Focus school of photography, and obtained a Masters in fine art form Chelsea College of art and design. He has participated in a numerous of exhibitions, in art spaces and museums such as. The DESTE foundation, the Hellenic American union, the ICA, London the Macedonian Museum of Contemporary Art. From 2003 he is working at Focus School of Photography.
“In Every Home”
In his work, he uses a source material that comes from the personal computer archive of the deceased leader of Al Qaeda, Osama bin Laden. It became publicly available since 2017 through the official site of the CIA. From this archive, Zerdevas selects seemingly random images mostly taken from bin Laden personal cameras and corrupted image files found in the archive. With the artist’s seemingly random selection of images he tries to give a fragmented glimpse to the mindset of this controversial figure that is perhaps considered the greatest terrorist mind to date.
Through this assemblage of images he tries to examine and propose the possibility for them, no matter how ordinary or commonplace they may seem, to be considered as elements of a possible conceptual construction that could be analogous to visual infernal machine. Their explosive possibility being not in the content of the images but in their status as personal files of a terrorist mastermind and their similarity to common files found in an average computer.
"War Landscapes"
Masao Adachi and Koji Wakamatsu two Japanese radical filmmakers and sympathizers of the outlawed radical left terrorist group Japanese Red Army filmed in Lebanon at 1971 perhaps the first propaganda film done for a terrorist group called Red Army/PFLP: Declaration of World War” (1971), based on the theory they had developed in their earlier films called landscape theory.
Which in turn was Inspired by Marxist film criticism of the 1970’s, and posits that even the landscape around us is an expression of the dominant political power. In my series war landscapes I take footage from current terrorist/war propaganda films from the middle east and try to investigate if the theory proclaimed by Adachi in the 1970 could be still be found in contemporary propaganda videos from the area,despite the vast ideological differences of the makers and the changes imposed by the new digital Internet era.
Can theories like the landscape theory proposed by Adachi and his peers still hold some essence and meaning in an era defined by globalization and the liquidation of ideologies states and borders? Can landscape imagery have a direct effect anymore or by itself it has become liquefied and therefore difficult to be contained to any particular meaning.
