Margareta Kern: Thursday War

A lecture-performance by Margareta Kern, combines the autobiographical, the fictional and the factual to explore the representational possibilities of unravelling the militarist frame.   

Located somewhere between Anglia and Fantasia, the narrative takes us through the events witnessed from a kitchen window: ships training for a future war, Chinook helicopters flying low, submarines named after sea mammals collecting secrets. Choreographed to fictional scenarios, these war-game (p)re-enactments have been named by the British Navy as a ‘Thursday War’. 

In assembling the material collected and recorded over the past six years - documentary and archival footage, correspondence letters, local news reports, military tweets - Kern raises a series of representational questions and problems around the (im)possibility of images to resist the militarised logic, and a potential of (auto)fiction to produce oppositional images that confront it.

Margareta Kern (Bosnia-Herzegovina/UK) is a visual artist whose work examines the complex relationship between technologies of perception, practices of power and control, and processes of subject-making. Her work has been shown widely, including at the Kreuzberg Museum Berlin (2019), Whitstable Biennale (2018), Galerija Nova (2017), Cultural Centre Belgrade (2015), The Photographers Gallery (2015), Tate Modern (2013), and many others. She was the recipient of the 54th October Salon Award (2013) and more recently the Arts Council England supported residency at Birkbeck School of Law (2019). In 2021, her text ‘Dream State: hugs, dreams and British psychopolitics’ was published by the Harun Farocki Institute and the Journal of Visual Culture, and can be read here. Currently a PhD candidate at the University of Arts London, Kern is developing a practice-led thesis on the subversive uses of fiction(ing) in contemporary art. www.margaretakern.com