Monumental Death

How are we implicated in the images of power that surround us? How do our actions mimic what we have learned from those that lead us?

Greeting visitors at EMPAC’s main entrance, this interactive sculpture premiere invites us to embody and witness the gesture of the “heroic” death: a dramatized cycle of falling and rising that has long served as a symbol of nationalist ideals. Kate Ladenheim draws on, while sharply critiquing, the formal conventions and political assumptions of monumental sculpture to create an anti-monument that repurposes military materials and trigger mechanics.

Provided with a set of “score” instructions, participants become a part of a system of rising and falling bodies. The sculpture requires not just a single participant but variations on a collective action: people falling on mats activate the rise of an inflatable torso atop a pedestal covered in bullet casings. Without the viewers’ performance of self-sacrifice, the figure of power remains inert and deflated. Together, participants physically rehearse this trope of monumental proportions, revealing how “heroic” figures are constructed, and how many bodies are required, invisibilized, or lost in the process of holding them up.