Justyna Badach

Land of Epic Battles & Proxy War

My work examines the transmutation of history and repackaging of violence though appropriation and re-contextualization of images derived from films created for a male audience. My latest project, Land of Epic Battles and Proxy War are comprised of large-scale, prints made using gun powder. The images depict scenes culled from the online archives of ISIS recruitment data streams as well as American and Russian military internet propaganda, released as part of the ongoing war in the Middle East.

Today the great landmarks of tradition have been destroyed, but without society proposing new ones in their place. In a recent book, La Vraie Vie, Alain Badiou conceptualizes male adolescence, “as the experience of disorientation following the dissolution of the patriarchal symbolic order in the West. For boys and men . . . there is no clear exit from the symbolic disorientation in a capitalist desert where traditional rites of initiation into adulthood such as a job and marriage no longer operate. . .. So, in the happy, anxious void where the Law of the Father once spoke, we now have revenge porn, trolling, and terrorism. Their nihilism is a mix of sacrificial and criminal heroism, and a general aggression toward the Western world. This aggression is based on forms of traditional and identitarian regression, on the debris of tradition that are offered to them.” Land of Epic Battles (2015-2018) focuses on the hyper-masculine, violent world of ISIS recruitment videos that grew out of these socio-economic, technological and cultural shifts that are occurring on a global level. Disseminated via YouTube, as well as through private, encrypted internet subscription channels, ISIS datastreams are endemic of the larger proliferation of computer files and digital “info-war” visuals that are provided on demand and watched by choice, negating concerns about legality and morality that have traditionally defined mass-media content. Similarly, Proxy War (2018-present) examines the parallel world of Russian and US military internet propaganda that grew out of “the war on terror” and seeks to glorify military operations taking place across the Islamic world. As these two adversarial nations compete to maintain their sphere of influence in the region, they, like ISIS, employ the pervasive glorification of violence and wanton destruction as a tool to motivate their “followers”.

Working from the position of both censor and video editor, I isolate the single frames depicting sites that serve as backdrops for these displays of male camaraderie, acts of violence, and mutilations. The resulting screen captures do not overtly display the acts violence. Instead, the images give form to the info-war coded lexicon of methods, signs, and symbols of contemporary warfare. Through this coded iconography and the destructive potential of the gunpowder that is used to make the images, the violence of the source material is registered. In Land of Epic Battles, the title for each image is taken from the ISIS video episode in which the image appeared, drawing our attention back to the horrific acts disseminated by these streams. These titles, such as The Necks Cutting; Crush Your Enemies; or My Revenge, lend context and form to what at first glance may seem like a series of random objects and sites. An image that resembles a graphite drawing of an empty truck in the desert or a helicopter hovering in a cloud-filled sky is indeed innocuous, until we’re told that the context is ISIS-produced media and that the print itself is made of explosives. The appropriation of language is also an important to the understanding of Proxy War, which take their image titles directly from language used during US and Russian press conferences on the war in Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan.

Land of Epic Battles and Proxy War become the means through which we witness the pernicious forces at play in contemporary internet war media that employs the sophisticated tools and visual vocabulary of virtual reality games, reality TV, and DIY videos. Employing and subverting methods commonly used in the entertainment industry, ISIS and the military create media, that feeds on viewers’ addiction to social media, exploits the voyeuristic lure of reality TV, and nourishes their audience’s desire to watch what is socially taboo. One of most striking features of the ISIS DIY “video streams” is their slick production strategies, and like the military messaging, their ability to continuous morph their distribution channels in order to avoiding attempts at image suppression or origin verification. It is clear that our collective experience is becoming increasingly fragmented and the reality of global vents is being defined and shaped by surreptitious media producers and algo-rhythms designed to getting as close as possible to viewers. As such, Land of Epic Battles and Proxy War registers the initial signs of a larger impending seismic shift that will inevitably alter our future collective experience and understanding of conflict and war.

Bachelor Portraits

"Inwardness as a place of absolute freedom within one's own self was discovered in late antiquity by those who had no place of their own in the world." Hannah Arendt (Origins of Totalitarianism, 1951

My images are an investigation of rejection, isolation, marginalization and expression of individual desires. As an artist that came to the United States as a refugee, I am trying to make sense of personal displacement and a fragmented personal history. As a woman, I am curious about what my life would be like if I were a man and the possibility of inhabiting a masculine space. Having spent my childhood under a totalitarian regime, I have little faith in the veracity of photographic documents. My interest in images lay in their subjectivity and their relationship to individual experience.

For the past 5 years I have been collaborating on a series of portraits with bachelors. These men tend to exist on the margins of culture and are often considered invisible by society. I usually meet the men for the first time when I arrive at their home to collaborate on a picture. The images we construct together depict the safety of places where they withdraw from the world to think, meditate and act out their fantasies. I am interested in the way that these personal spaces serve as both portrait and the junction between masculine and feminine, the man and myself.

Like bachelorhood, these spaces are both a refuge and a prison; the place where the men get back in touch with themselves by depriving themselves of an emotional connection with the outside world.  To gain access into this solitary world I must give up control of my environment and perhaps my safety. By relinquishing a level of control to the men, I am able to engage our mutual vulnerability, loneliness and discomfort.

The process of making these images embodies a form of role reversal, a feminine penetration into a masculine space. Many of the men expand a great deal of effort to arrange their living space, developing a kind of personal iconography or domestic vernacular. At times, this space is so profoundly personal, that it feels like I am standing in someone else's skin, a space too uncomfortable for anyone other than the bachelor to occupy. I am very interested in this part of the process, the juncture where the man's personal experience, their discomfort, collapses into my own and their voice becomes mine. This interaction is rooted in a symbiotic exchange of power or the engendering of other. The images/text represent the boundaries of what the man and I choose to reveal/conceal about ourselves to each other and the camera.

Justyna Badach arrived in the US as a refugee in 1980. She received her MFA from the Cranbrook Academy of Art and currently resides in Philadelphia, where she is an artist, educator, and museum professional. Her work has been exhibited extensively throughout the United States and abroad. Solo exhibitions include: Light Work Syracuse, White Columns New York, Gallery 339 Philadelphia, Blue Sky Gallery in Portland and Contemporary Art Center in Las Vegas. Badach’s images have been included in over 30 group exhibitions, most notably at the Michener Museum, Rick Wester Gallery, Catherine Edelman Gallery and the Australian Center for Photography. Her work has been reviewed extensively and images have been featured in Wired Magazine, Contact Sheet, F-Stop Magazine, Dummy Magazine and several exhibition catalogs. Badach’s work is the permanent collections of Portland Art Museum, Museet for Fotokunst Brandts, Odense, Denmark, Center for Photography Woodstock, Cranbrook Museum of Art, Rice University Library, Houston, TX, Temple University, Philadelphia, PA and Haverford College. She has been awarded an artist residency from Light Work, and grants from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, Leeway Foundation and The Independence Foundation.  

Bachelor Portraits images are available as 30 x 23" (w/ 4½ x 23" text) and 39¾ x 31" (w/ 5½ x 31" text) pigment prints made in editions of 3 in each size. Pieces range in price from $2000 to $5500, depending on size and availability.

Please call: (312) 266 - 2350 for prices of specific pieces.
Prices are print only unless otherwise indicated.