Philip Zimmermann
Reaper , 2015
Artwork Shop
6.5 x 7.5
x 1.5
in
Pigmented archival inkjet on French Paper, hand-bound Turkish-fold book. Cloth spine on boards with inset title text. Numbered and signed edition of 25. Reaper is a meditation on the destructive cycle of violence (as in war) followed by attempts at rebuilding. This is then followed by yet another iteration of that destruction and rebuilding: a painful cycle that has continued with minor variations throughout history. It is most commonly caused by the friction and antagonism between different belief systems and the extreme actions of fundamentalists and their often rigidly held intolerant ideas. In this book, based on the Turkish-map-fold structure, text is read on several levels. The outer tabs hold the first ten lines of the primary texts of that particular belief system, and they include the Rig-Veda the oldest sacred Hindu text, the Torah (Genesis) from the Jewish faith, the first lines of the Christian New Testament Bible, and finally the first ten lines from the Qur’an from Islam. The title of the book refers to both death, as ‘the great reaper’, and to the model name of one of the American drone or UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicles) used for bombing in the Middle East.
$425