Johannes Hepp The Days After

Adopting the title from the 1983 film 'The Day After', a graphic story about the days before, during and after a nuclear strike upon the USA, German artist Johannes Hepp has created a unique series of benign, yet paradoxically disturbing, images which metaphorically conflate the decisive moment of terror attacks and the passage of time.

Ranging literally from just a few hours after an atrocity [Tel Aviv] to some 23 years [Munich], the artist searches out places around the world which have been devastated by terror attacks, and which are indelibly ingrained in the public imagination through global media saturation. He records people going about their daily business in these previously sabotaged areas. The focus is always on life afterwards and everyday risk-taking: for example, by riding a train again at Kasumagiseki Station in Tokyo or by attending the reopening of the bar 'Mike‘s Place' in Tel Aviv, just three days after a horrible suicide-bombing.
All of these prophetic images are composed digitally, and montaged together with anything up to 100 images, depicting incidents taken from different timeframes. Delibera-tely avoiding the notion of objectivity, 'The Days After' does not attempt to portray any illu-sions of reality, instead the work aims to raise an awareness of the symbiotic relationship between terrorism and the oxygen of publicity generated by media coverage - with innocent human beings providing the collateral.
Created in panoramic format, to reinforce the on-going narrative, these restrained but deeply unsettling images question our relationship to the notion of indiscriminate violence and bear witness to an era becoming historic: the era of terror.

Christopher Coppock
Director

23 October - 5 December 2004
Fotogallery – Cardiff