ART VIDEO

CARELESS - 2001 (shot & edited by Tunde Adebimpe, director Theresa Byrnes)
St Marks Church - New York
Museum of New Art, Detroit

OPENING - 2002
St Marks Church - New York

CRASH 21 - 2003
Tompkins Square Plaza

THIS PAGE UNDER CONSTRUCTION, STAY TUNED!

 

Me Meat We War

By Theresa Byrnes, 2004

15 minutes duration

 

The black and white portion of this piece is a video I made for a performance. This now complete version incorporates this and the performance itself.

 

Like cattle, we are in cages, being prepared for slaughter. The film concludes that we are prisoners of consumerism.

 

No race or species is of greater importance than any other. Life is sacred and the sanction of murder, be it of animal or human is equally abhorrent.

 

Non-violent political action to make change globally begins with our own consumption. "Fascism begins at breakfast."

 

There is no difference in the sacredness of my life and that of an animal strung up for slaughter. War is made possible by the belief that we must murder to survive and that belief is confirmed by eating carcass. To condone animal slaughter by eating flesh is the primary step in accelerating global violence.

 

Synopsis

Celebrating The Arsenal

By Theresa Byrnes

6 minute duration

2007

 

Comparing the visual drama of fireworks to military bombing (explosions)

Contemplating the human shock, awe and in the sight & sound of massive power. and how celebration and annihilation both seed an inherent thrill.

  

The human need for a God or government, an entity either esoteric or perfunctory relieves the individual of responsibility. But in that relief contorts the meaning of freedom - from freedom that is experienced, acted out in every choice to one that is delivered in an enormous blast overwhelming.

 

Our quiet personal power is un-see-able, gunpowder and sulphurs exploding in the sky and the magnificent mushroom cloud of the atomic bomb is power in its most overt.

 

To cease war we must first examine and understand power. The way in which we celebrate life and freedom as in a fireworks display is confirming our belief that true joy and power is outside of the individual.

 

Fireworks –

 T. Byrnes

 

Does the sound of bombing terrify us or does it thrill, send shudders of shock-joy, bewildered at the color and beauty that arises

Far bigger than we could ever hope to be

Like God

And he commands that we be mystified and in wonderment.

 

Shall we celebrate life with killing & displacing billions of organisms

Shall we celebrate privilege in a way we cannot afford

That does not support future

But affirms powerlessness and our inability to shift to a new way of joy.

 

Half an hour of mass splendor, a coming together of dumbness, hip-hip-horary

And when the smoke disperses and the used fireworks are raked away

We go back to our beds

With bombs for breakfast.