We think we know what harm looks like. From breaking news to social media, we are saturated with a constant stream of images of victims set against collapsed facades, darkened walls, dust hanging in the air, and streets brought to a halt under rubble. In this flow of images, we learn where to look for casualty and, just as crucially, where not to: within the uninterrupted course of day-to-day routine. Casual/Tease lingers exactly where nothing seems to happen, within the casual continuity of everyday life: a quiet view from a window onto a flowering boulevard, a household ladder leaning within reach, a handmade ceramic vessel ready to hold a bouquet. Each work in Casual/Tease first appears as a small, innocent fragment of daily life, caught in a fleeting moment of ease. Look a little longer, however, and that ease begins to fracture. The window view borrows the gaze of a military drone; the ladder becomes the impossible reach for food amid genocide; the delicate vessel reveals the form of a grenade, handmade in wartime Japan. To look here, then, is not simply to uncover what was hidden, but to confront what perception itself has been trained to overlook.
What comes into view is a dispersed field of implication in which neither injury nor agency remains confined to the site of war. First, the works bring us face to face with those who produce its casualties from spaces that still carry the appearance of casual life: from bright university laboratories associated with human progress where technologies of warfare take shape, through spacious offices where their production is financed and their sale negotiated, along everyday routes of commerce where weapons move among the ordinary flow of goods, to the safe distance from which armies deploy remote warfare technologies, preserving the appearance of everyday life here while bringing it to a halt elsewhere. The exhibition extends this encounter, too, to those who live with war’s casualties in places where everyday life appears to have resumed: walking across poisoned ground, breathing contaminated air, inhabiting landscapes scattered with the remnants of past wars, and living among materials in which military violence quietly persists long after the moment of impact has disappeared from view. In holding these two ends of the same continuum together, Casual/Tease resists the structures that bind them, reaching toward another kind of casual reality; one that leaves no casualties in its wake.