OPENING: John Moran’s politically charged work debuts in Belgium this weekend

A solo exhibition of work in glass by American artist John Moran opening this weekend in Ghent, Belgium, has potential for controversy. Titled "I Came, I Saw, I Concurred," the show includes mixed media and glass sculptures depicting a young boy with a gunshot wound, emaciated children amidst garbage, and an unmistakable Osama Bin Laden sprawled out in a shopping cart, among others. The exhibition, which will run at the gallery of the humanist center Kunst In Het Geuzenhuis through December 8, 2013, is the artist’s first solo exhibition in Europe.

The Osama Bin Laden sculpture, Sale of a Deathman, holds the biggest potential for contention. The EU has a history of backlash against critique of Islamic culture, most prominently the widespread and violent protests to the Muhammad cartoons published by Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten in 2005. However, Moran sees the show not as a critique of the Middle-East, but of the U.S., and specifically the attitudes towards violence he’s observed. He began working on the piece in response to the Benghazi attacks, the death of Bin Laden, and the riots caused by an inflammatory anti-Muslim video The Innocence of Muslims, which appeared online in 2012.

Moran tells the GLASS Quarterly Hot Sheet, “To be clear, the sculpture had always been about the American reaction to the killing of Bin Laden not the actual killing itself.” He added, “On the day after the attacks, when I began the piece, I knew, for me, that it was not so much about Bin Laden, but about the conflicting perceptions people can have of individuals killed pursuing and defending dogmatic beliefs.”

Aesthetically, Moran’s inspiration for Sale of a Deathman is The Death of Marat, the painting by Jacques-Louis David of murdered leader of the French Revolution Jean-Paul Marat. The resemblance between  the sculpture and the painting is striking; the figures recline in almost identical postures. The reference to the Reign of Terror adds a layer of depth to an already complex take on the commodification of the U.S. War on Terror.

Other sculptures in the show incorporate similarly raw visuals and political subject matter. A piece titled backtoschool is Moran’s response to the killings at Newtown, Connecticut’s Sandy Hook Elementary in 2012. “What I found the most troubling was how the discussion turned to gun control and how this could be shaped so much by this single instance and the instances like this that continue to occur on a daily basis. This discussion seems to center around how something happens, and for the most part it never truthfully focuses on why something happens.”

The gallery materials describe "I Came, I Saw, I Concurred" as a depiction of the U.S. as a “new third-world country.” Moran clarified that this is mostly tongue-in-cheek: “In many ways, my work is an attempt to poke fun and react to some of the instances and events in contemporary society, which I believe are generally related to a larger systemic problem. I am trying to find a path to navigate between satire and seriousness to create a memorable, emotional experience and hopefully leave enough room to consider what is at the base.”

—Erin Somers

IF YOU GO: