Najia Fatima

The work is responds to the U.S. military’s advancement in Pakistan in late 2003 that resulted in the killing of numerous children due to stray landmines left in open grounds and fields used for play. I took the words “Landmines exploding” from Jenny Holzer’s text in her exhibition XX in Vienna, and the aesthetic inspiration from Francis Picabia’s Dada art to reference the political turmoil of the time. The words superimposed on an image of a deconstructed landmine rationalizes the psychological weight of the words- a play on the representation of wars as numbers and statistics in the news and media outlets.