Place / Non Place

Lisa Oppenheim, The Sun is Always Setting Somewhere Else, 2006, 35mm slide projection.

With the The Sun is Always Setting Somewhere Else, Oppenheim takes on another displacement, this time, however, not a temporal but a spatial one. Here she finds online images of the setting sun taken by U.S. soldiers in Iraq. The majority of these photographs seem overtly to exclude the reality of war in which they are taken, in favour of the blazing sunsets more familiar to greeting cards than war mementos. Ordering 15 of these images as the sun sets in the frame, Oppenheim re-photographs them placed by her outstretched arm over the sun as it sets in her native New York.