Season Four featured artist, Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle, has a new installation on view at Documenta 12 in Kassel, Germany.
Manglano-Ovalle, a MacArthur Fellow from 2001 through 2005, presents Phantom Truck, a real scale reproduction of a mobile biological weapons lab as described by U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell when addressing the U.N. Security Council, prior to the U.S. invasion of Iraq. The sculpture is a hybrid of renderings used by Colin Powell and photographs of actual truck trailers found by Kurdish and U.S. Military forces after the invasion. The trailers found and photographed in Iraq after the U.S. invasion were later determined not to be capable of biological weapons production. Manglano-Ovalle has produced a platonic idealization of the mobile lab, giving reality to this ‘phantom truck’, only to conceal it again within the confines of a darkened space hidden within the exhibition.
The work is on view at Documenta from June 16 – September 23, 2007
Originally published in Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle’s web site.
See more images of this work on Flickr.
Read the press release here.
