... Out of Here: The Veteran’s Project

Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston

Through March 28

When you step into Krzysztof Wodiczko’s room-size art installation, you step out of Boston and into Iraq, said Sebastian Smee in The Boston Globe. Your eyes will notice only a set of windows (actually projections) high on a wall. But “what your ears will tell you” is that you’re in a crowded coffee­house, as the sounds of marketplace haggling and an imam’s prayers filter in. Suddenly there’s the sound of gunfire, Humvees roaring to a stop, a dog being struck. Then, “after several intense minutes,” there’s the sound of wailing women. You seem to have witnessed “an ambush—a frightening but routine event” for soldiers in Iraq. Yet it’s nothing like the ambushes you’ve seen in war movies. You feel as if you’ve lived through it, and—since the audio sequence plays on a permanent loop—it soon comes to seem “like a recurring nightmare.”

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The relentless repetition can also seem to indicate “cycles of violence, or post-traumatic stress disorder,” said Greg Cook in the Boston Phoenix. But primarily it’s meant to be a visceral experience that “gets under your skin.” On display nearby at the Boston Institute of Contemporary Art are several other video and audio pieces by Wodiczko that also address the Iraq war; many quite movingly incorporate footage from actual interviews with British and American servicemen. Still, ... Out of Here is “scarier, more visceral, more heartbreaking.” The artist has enlisted actors, veterans, and complex special effects to “create a heightened distillation of the Iraq war.” Rather than just telling us what war is like, Wodiczko “involves us in a visual and audio experience” that in effect becomes our own memory.