Jack Faber: Dictionary of Darkness

Dictionary of Darkness is looking into the official Department of Defense (DoD) lexicon of military terms through the planetary perspectives of ecological conflict. Studying the role of current armed struggles within wider environmental warfare, it contrasts its vocabulary with views from disputed frontiers, contested areas and (past and present) colonies.

Questioning the logic that drives the development of technologies that militarize nature, dominate the wild and domesticate it to the point of devastation, Dictionary of Darkness focuses on the technically detached language that propagates this process. Still, the installation explores the seductiveness of the same semi-professional syntactical appeal which is rapidly disseminated and popularized by the cultural complex and media. The work uses contemporary archival approaches to examine the extreme outbreak of the current global security crisis and its escalating economy of violence.

Consisting of dual sited cinematic installation, the solo exhibition Dictionary of Darkness explores new connections between the accelerating global security and ecological crises. Simultaneously, the two exhibition sites suggest an escalating situation of diminishing resources, with limited or denied access to essential materials and spaces, that is mirrored in both the current international crises and their mode of presentation.

Dictionary of Darkness is a real-time response to these disruptions and the personal sense of destruction they engulf in these days of violence and conflict, while delving into the inner depths of the covert connections between the security economy and the environment, surveillance and species survival, oppression and subversion.

Jack Faber (b. 1978) is a Helsinki-based award-winning filmmaker and artist-researcher, investigating the security economy’s influence on the arts and its role as climate crisis catalyst. He explores cartographies of critique through positive practices of disobedience, focusing on cinematic and moving images as sites of conflict and reconciliation. His interdisciplinary practice questions—through subversive use of drones, tropes and new technologies in unexpected ways—the accelerated militarization of public spaces and the formation of ecological conflict zones.

Merging film, collaborative projects and installations, Jack’s practice examines possibilities of participatory engagements and interspecies equality through in-depth studies of institutional ecologies, technologies and extinction economies. JKFR sensitively uses humor, transgression and cinematic immersion for explorations which highlights inequality and oppression. Such explorations have been in the center of censorship and international civil rights cases (as with the “Watchmen” trial), and been presented in the Berlinale, TFL and other venues.

Another venue for the exhibition is the Artistic Research Site (K247) at the Academy of Fine Arts, University of Helsinki, Mylly building, 2nd floor (Sörnäisten rantatie 19, Helsinki). The exhibition at Huuto IV Gallery is open Tuesday–Sunday 12–6pm, Free admission (K247 upon appointment).

The exhibition is supported by the Kone Foundation.