Thousands of Americans belong to gaming communities that play out historical battles with miniature soldiers on handmade dioramas. They may fight the battles of ancient Hittites and Babylonians, the Napoleonic wars, or World War II. Games begin with historically accurate scenarios.
They are not reenactments, however, because events proceed via war strategy and rolls of the dice, and arrive at divergent historical outcomes.
At Games Expo in Las Vegas on March 19–21, 2007, I asked a group of gamers to “play”/fight three battles from the war in Iraq, using recent information from Western and Iraqi news sites, and real-time reports from Iraqi bloggers. The gamers built a diorama that was used to represent a town in the Zarga region near Najaf for the first two games, and a neighborhood in Baghdad for the third. An onsite research team investigated and selected the scenarios.
The first game restaged an attack by a group called Soldiers of the Sky on a police barricade, on January 28, 2007, during the Ashura pilgrimage from Najaf to Karbala. This game was based on reports from Western news sources. The second game restaged the same event as seen through the eyes of civilians whose clan, the Hawatim, was involved. The last event followed a live hostage crisis that had begun in Februrary, 2007, when Hannelore Kadhim and her son Sinan were kidnapped from their Baghdad home by a group called the Arrows of Righteousness.
The players who collaborated on this project are absent from the current installation, as are the soldiers, civilians, and politicians involved in the war.
—B. C.
Brian Conley’s artistic practice operates between the divide of science, art and politics, from radio performance to sculptural and sound-based installations. He has shown projects in Bitstreams at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Statements at ArtBasel; and a commission from the ArtPace Foundation for Contemporary Art. He was included in the exhibition Becoming Animal at MassMoca, North Adams, MA; and the exhibition Insight/Out: Eight Americans at the Wanas Foundation in Sweden. He is founding co-editor with Sina Najafi of Cabinet Magazine, an international art and culture quarterly. He is also on the faculty of the Fine Art program at California College of the Arts in San Francisco.