Gallery 2
Like a Body Without Skin
Fiona Amundsen
This exhibition addresses the relationships between steel manufacturing industries and their mobilisation into a united national front that produced everything from planes to bombs during WWII. The focus here concerns not so much the role steel manufacturing has in WWII narratives, but rather how ideologies of nationalism and cultural belonging are perpetuated through capitalist production associated with times of war. Accordingly, Like a Body Without Skin brings together archival imagery with present-day photographing and filming of Carrie Furnace, a former blast furnace in Rankin, Pittsburgh, USA. The residues of this site are positioned with a voice recording that describes the affects of the 1945 WWII incendiary-bombing of Tokyo, where 100,000 civilians were reduced to ‘bodies without skin’ due to the intensity of fire produced from the steel clad cluster munitions.
