Firstsite, Colchester
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The Belgian artist and filmmaker Johan Grimonprez came to prominence when this highly-acclaimed montage was shown in 1997. The work traces the history of airplane hijackings through found video footage and televised images. Grimonprez juxtaposes this central narrative with references to the Cold War and quotations from Don DeLillo’s novels White Noise and Mao II.
Examining the abundance of information available via the media, much of which is spectacular and sensationalist, Grimonprez acknowledges the hidden or unseen events which cannot be recorded. He thus presents the viewer with the potential impossibility of documenting historical fact.