Dear Job, Leave God Alone

Drawing parallels between both biblical scriptures and contemporary geopolitical war-machines, Dear Job is an assemblage which reflects upon the nature of violence, and our desire to impart meaning upon acts of mass violence. Perhaps in antagonism to Adorno’s famous assertion - that there can be no poetry after Auschwitz - Dear Job utilises the poetics of space and material in order to negotiate the unrepresentability of violence. Just as Job of the Old Testament proclaims the futility of seeking meaning in God’s acts of divine violence, so too is the genocide inflicted by imperial nation states beyond the scope of rational logic. In order to tie these seemingly disparate powers together, Yorkson combines the traditionally religious medium of stained glass with cartoon characters and pop culture references. Amidst the show’s opening performance, where Yorkson sang a rendition of Chopin’s Étude, Op. 10, No. 3 in E Major, a stained glass sculpture of the Holy Trinity lies half-buried in the desert floor of the space. The icons for God, the Father and the Holy Spirit have been substituted with warped cartoonish symbols representing the judicial, legislative and executive faculties of the modern day nation state. Surrounded by candles, a shattered blade and a pair of handcuffs, the site is transformed into a visual elegy: a forlorn dirge for those lost to the meaninglessness of both divine and state-sanctioned violence.