Edmund Clark: Cosmopolemos

We are delighted to host a talk by artist Edmund Clark, he links history, politics and representation through photography, video, documents, found images and installation. Recurring themes are experiences, spaces and systems of control and power in contemporary conflict and other contexts.

Previous subjects include extraordinary rendition and the CIA secret detention programme, detention at the US Naval Base Guantanamo Bay, and UK government anti-terrorism procedures. Clark spent five years as artist-in-residence in HM Prison Grendon, Europe’s only wholly therapeutic prison for violent and sexually violent offenders. Solo museum exhibitions include the International Center of Photography Museum, New York, the Imperial War Museum, London, and Zephyr Raum für Fotografie, Reiss-Engelhorn-Museen, Mannheim. Awards include the Royal Photographic Society Hood Medal and an Honorary RPS Fellowship, the British Journal of Photography International Photography Award and, with Crofton Black, an ICP Museum Infinity Award and Rencontres d’Arles Photo-Text Book Award. He holds a PhD by Published Work from the University of the Arts London where he is Reader in the Political Image.

Edmund will discuss his most recent project Cosmopolemos, an exploration of knowledge and meaning in relation to an overwhelming edifice of power. America spends as much on its defence as the next nine countries put together each year, accounting for 40% of military spending worldwide. $6.5 trillion worth of contracts were issued by the U.S. Department of Defense between the attacks of 9/11 and the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan in August 2021. The items accounted for between these two iconic events encompass every aspect of life and death – from oil reserves and nuclear weapons to cookies and cleaning services: over 43 million recorded transactions, with contractors large and small. These corporate relationships underpin the hegemony of the world’s foremost superpower in 2026, the 250th anniversary of the American Declaration of Independence. They aren’t secret. But their scale and complexity challenges understanding.

Visual artist Edmund Clark and investigative reporter Crofton Black decided to interrogate this complexity using a traditional, now redundant form: the printed Encyclopaedia. For centuries, humans have grappled with their imperfect knowledge of the universe using this form to portray inconceivable complexity between two covers. Photographic illustration is provided by the Department of Defense’s photo gallery – the images it chooses to represent itself. Clark and Black provide these images in two contexts, a Gazetteer focussing on countries where activities take place, and a Glossary of words found in both the descriptive field of a transaction and the caption field of an image file. In combining the Department of Defense’s transaction data with its soft-focus photography of American military power, this Encyclopaedia offers a representation of everything the US military paid for everywhere. How can we comprehend the meaning and scale of such power and our significance before it? This analysis of scale, knowledge and meaning presents the military-industrial-technical complex through an interplay of images, data and language.