Osama bin Laden is Dead

 

Digital video montage, 16 min, 2011

 

Osama bin Laden is Dead chronicles the online responses made in the hours and days after President Obama announced the assassination of the terrorist leader. People from around the country responded to bin Laden’s death with everything from cautious relief, to jubilant celebration, to flat out disbelief. This piece seeks not only to document the array of responses but to consider their morality and what they may reflect about our national character. The death of an enemy is equal parts catharsis and ethical dilemma as we struggle with what Bin Laden’s death means for us and the legacy of the attacks of September 11, 2001.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

May 2, 2011, Morgantown, West Virginia (Osama bin Laden is Dead)

 

Silent, multi-channel video installation

2o min (loop)

2011

 

May 2, 2011, Morgantown, West Virginia (Osama bin Laden is Dead) is a video installation derrived from Osama bin Laden is Dead   that examines one of many celebratory and violent moments that erupted following President Obama’s announcement of Osama bin Laden’s death. Here, a group of West Virginia University students set their couch on fire and watch it burn. Onlookers captured this moment, at once visually arresting and ethically fraught, that is then slowed it down and unraveled for the viewer. Interrogating both the public reaction to the death and its documentation in the poor images recorded, then immediately disseminated online, May 2, 2011, Morgantown, West Virginia (Osama bin Laden is Dead) is a provocative meditation on the way in which public grief and anger manifests in the celebration of a person’s killing.