Miranda Pennell’s film work screened in 2021 at Berlinale, New York Film Festival, and Viennale. Group exhibitions include Intersectional Geographies (2022) Martin Parr Foundation, Bristol; Visions of Empire (2021) Padrao dos Descobrimentos, Lisbon; Tanzbilder (2019), New Museum for Art and Design, Nuremberg. She is currently artist in residence at the School of Law at Birkbeck, University of London.
Strange Object, 2020
HD video, 15 minutes
Courtesy of the artist
In 1910, aviation was a cutting-edge technology, with the figure of flight used to encode national rebirth in the writings of Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Gabriele D’Annunzio and Julius Peterson. But these fantasies of departure and renewal were imbricated with colonial ravage. Artist Miranda Pennell explores the link between the aerial viewpoint (bird’s-eye view) and total war, a concept first put forth in H. G. Wells’ novel War of the Worlds (1898), denoting a war that would bring total destruction without moral limitations. Her video essay Strange Object takes, in her words, ‘aerial photographs of an undisclosed colonised territory as the starting point for a meditation on images, erasure and the writing of history’.