At the Saatchi Gallery Project Room is a breathtaking feat produced by American artist Emily Prince. My intrigue in this piece was to do with exactly the noble, humble intricacy that she put into the project. She drew a card-sized portrait of each American serviceman/woman who died in Iraq and Afghanistan since 2001. (As goes the title of the piece: Servicemen and Women Who Died in Iraq and Afghanistan (Not Including the Wounded nor the Iraqis nor the Afghanis)).
Being able to fill the walls of a large room with the cards that she tacked into the wall, having two large glass cases with her index cards and filed information on each of the servicemen as well as a newspaper clipping with the photo she had drawn her portrait from, it was really the breadth and care for each individual that took me.
Continuing from this, it would be remarkably moving to be able to see/read a story about each of these people: who they were, why they were in ‘combat’, how they were killed, and what their families think today. It can go on, as each of these servicemen and women have even more to them than being merely the faces symbolizing the bloodshed and futility of war.
As a sort of exercise in mapping, it seems that even the most intricate and far removed stories somehow come back to where one (viewer) may have started, the 'six-degrees-of-separation' effect comes alive when one may see that one of the stories may be closer than they think. For example, amidst the thousands of pieces of paper with faces, names, dates of birth and dates and cities of death, was the woman who died in my home country, Bahrain. Perhaps that doesn't have much to do with 'Bahrainis' in a personal context, but it is an interesting angle to see how "Bahrain" (and whatever the country means to me versus what it now means by representation of this project) figures in the greater scheme of what made this history.