'Staging Disorder' brings together work that considers the contemporary representation of the real in relation to photography, architecture and modern conflict. The works include images from five photographic series that were made independently of each other: Adam Broomberg sOliver Chanarin's Chicago (Israel, 2007), Claudio Hils' Red Land Blue Land (Germany, 2000), Richard Mosse's Airside(2007), Sarah Pickering's Control Order (UK, 2002-2005), and Christopher Stewarts's Kill House (USA, 2005). The portrayal by these artists of mock domestic rooms, houses, planes, streets and whole fake towns designed as military architectural simulations in preparation for real and imagined future conflicts in different parts of the globe provoke a series of questions concerning the nature of truth as it manifests itself in current photographic practice. In highlighting the resonance that these five projects have with one another the publication develops a timely thesis on contemporary photography at a point when we are currently witnessing a shift away from a critical photographic discourse that has been preoccupied by theoretical concerns related to artifice and illusion, the constructed tableaux and the cinematic that often rejected or acted to deconstruct the 'real world' outside of the studio, to a type of post-illusion realism in documentary photography that incorporates a sophisticated accommodation of its own limitations and contradictions whilst still seeking to make sense of the external world. 'Staging Disorder' will appeal to an audience interested in a critical discourse relating to photography, architecture and military conflict and those who are keen to think about how slippery concepts of truth and the real stand up in an increasingly disordered world. The concept of 'staging disorder' looks not to how photographers have staged disordered reality themselves, but rather to how these artists have recognized and responded to a phenomenon of staging that already exists in the world. 'Staging Disorder' sits alongside an exhibition curated by Christopher Stewart (Faculty of Design, Architecture and Built Environment, University of Technology Sydney) through the University of the Arts London College of Communication Gallery, from a dialogue with Dr. Esther Teichmann (Senior Lecturer in Photographic Practice, LCC, UAL) and will align with a collaborative symposium in conjunction with the Imperial War Museum in London co-organised by Teichmann and Stewart, with the theme of this exhibition as a starting point. The exhibition will run from late January to March 2015 with the symposium taking place in late January 2015. 63 b/w and colour
