Hashim Thaci the 42 year old prime minister of Kosovo has been named in a report commissioned by the Council of Europe as the leader of a criminal network operating throughout Kosovo and Albania whose activities included trafficking in organs extracted from Serbian prisoners and kidnapped ethnic Albanians. The criminal network known as the Drencia Group formed when the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) co-founded by Thaci was fighting Serbian forces for control of the territory. The atrocities took place as secret KLA places of detention in northern Albania. Separate from the European Union, the Council of Europe is an organization with 47 member countries having responsibility for the European Court of Human Rights, that seeks to promote democracy and human rights.

Inspired by Doreen Carvajal and Marlise Simons at NYTimes http://ow.ly/3tX5D

Political Arts | Ian Bunn Visual Artist

My digital art work is essentially politics and art. It’s about iconic people, places and events of our day.  Recorded visually through daily compilations of manipulated digital images, posted online and disseminated via online media and social networks. The works are diaristic in nature that metaphorically record a spectator’s experience of the contemporary digital age.  The resulting work intentionally has a painterly aesthetic acknowledging my historical painting practice.

Adapting Pop Art’s notion of mass media imagery into a context of the contemporary digital age, the work draws on a myriad points of reference. Utilizing fractured images to provide an allusion to the digital noise pounding away daily into our sub consciousness.  The work is essentially popular culture arts, diverging from the traditional Pop Art notion of a pronounced repetition of a consumer icon, instead this work focuses on the deluge of contemporary digital content. The compilation of the fragmented imagery is vividly distractive, not unlike cable surfing or a jaunt through Times Square.

This digital photo manipulation art work is premised on the basis that Pop art in its beginnings, freeze-framed what consumers of popular culture experienced into iconic visual abstractions. With the advent of the techno age, visual information circulates in such quantities, so rapidly and exponentially, that to comprehend a fraction of it all becomes a kind of production process in itself.  Hence this work considers fragmented elements of Popular Culture through an artistic and conceptual exploration of specific people and events of the day.

www.ianbunn.com