BADEN PAILTHORPE

Cadence is a series of four new media artworks that negotiate the relationship between warfare and the performative traditions and rituals of military institutions. In each work, Australian, US and Taliban soldiers are placed in a series of formal landscapes appropriated from pro-military cinema and military simulators. Rather than enacting standard military gestures or postures, these simulated soldiers perform choreographed dances – slow and poetic in two of the works, tribal and syncopated in the others.

The movements of the collective military body can be perceived as a carefully calibrated choreography. The seductive visual rhythm of cadence, camouflage and mimicry in Baden Pailthorpe’s playful works gestures towards the dark heart of military history, where soldiers and psychedelics have often combined with alien environs to produce mystic escapes.

In July 2013 Baden Pailthorpe will commence his Early Career Residency at the Australian War Memorial in Canberra.