Left: Purified by Fire (Trench), 2006
Color video with audio on LCD monitor,
Continuous loop

Right: Purified by Fire (Bunker), 2006
Color video with audio on LCD monitor,
Continuous loop

Scenes from Stanley Kubrick's Vietnam War film Full Metal Jacket were reconstructed as seamless loops, picturing both sides of the conflict scanning the same burning cityscape (from different points of view) . These scenes, representing Vietnam, filmed on the outskirts of London, and resembling real everyday images from present-day Iraq, create a matrix of myth and history. In this reconstructed cityscape, the smoldering structures become eternal flames and military conflict is reconsidered as a single historical continuum.

These scenes are transposed, via window-projections, onto the physical cityscape in Purified by Fire (pictured in the first post).