Thomas Lubanga Dyilo a Congolese militia leader, the first person to have a trial launched by the new International Criminal Court at The Hague in the Netherlands after being accused of conscripting children under the age of 15 to fight for the Patriotic Forces for the Liberation of Congo. Dyilo’s war crimes trial stalled when the Court ordered his release after prosecution refused to provide witness identity citing security concerns.  The order was reversed at an Appeal Court hearing enabling the resumption of the trial. Between September 2002 and August 2003 Dyilo is alleged to have allowed the children to actively participate in Ituri hostilities located in the eastern province of the Congo.

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