Who tells what story? What is true and is truth important? If we don’t learn from the past, and are doomed to repeat it, does history matter?

Join artists Wafaa Bilal, Adam Brooks, Edra Soto, and Dolores Wilber, contributors to the exhibition Consuming War, on display November 4 - Janury 20, 2008, in Gallery 1 at the Hyde Park Art Center. Curated by Barbara Koenen, the exhibition includes works by Lynda Barry, Wafaa Bilal, Mary Brogger, Adam Brooks, Burtonwood & Holmes, Michael Hernandez de Luna, Fred Holland, Harold Mendez, Michael Rakowitz, Ellen Rothenberg, Edra Soto, Paula White and Dolores Wilber.

Focusing on the U.S. conflict in the Middle East over the past 10 years, Consuming War addresses the ways the American media and consumer culture have manipulated and influenced our perceptions of war, often turning it into a spectacle for American consumption. While war is an underlying theme in all the works, each addresses the concept of war, and our relationship to it, from a variety of angles, creating pieces that range from political cartoons to sculptures that recreate the archeological artifacts looted from the National Museum of Iraq and large suspended papier mâché bombs made from sale advertisements. Timely in its subject matter, Consuming War offers an innovative platform in which the complex and multifarious connections between war, capitalism, American consumer culture, and our everyday lives can be re-situated and critically examined.

Recorded Wednesday, December 05, 2007 at Hyde Park Art Center.