“The closer you are to these conflicts, the more cracked up you are when you come out,” says director and photojournalist Karim Ben Khelifa of his VR exhibit The Enemy. GRAHAM HUGHES / MONTREAL GAZETTE
How would you feel standing face to face with a Palestinian resistance fighter? An Israeli soldier? A hardened Salvadorian gang member? A Congolese military police officer, or rebel fighter?
You can find out in Karim Ben Khelifa’s virtual reality (VR) exhibit The Enemy, which runs through March 10 at the Phi Centre.
The Berlin-based, Belgian-Tunisian war correspondent’s CV includes work for New York Times Magazine, Le Monde, Vanity Fair and Newsweek. An invitation to be an artist in residence at MIT in 2013 led to a chance meeting with a VR company called Oculus, and an opportunity to reframe his work.
“I was at MIT with a project called Portrait of the Enemies,” Ben Khelifa recalled, returning from a smoke break Monday morning at the Phi Centre. “For that project, I had one photo on one side (of a room) and another photo on the other side; when you crossed the border you could stand in front of a photo and hear the fighters talking to you. When you crossed to the other side, you could hear the other fighters.”
The Enemy functions in a similar way. After donning VR headsets, headphones and backpacks, viewers stroll through a black-curtained room for the next 50 minutes, approaching, observing and hearing from combatants on opposite sides of the three above-mentioned conflicts.
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Source: Montreal Gazette