Hostage to Addiction
We live in a society of greed and excess; a society littered with people who take pleasurable indulgences to the level of addiction.
This series depicts five addictions, against the backdrop of Middle-Eastern hostage imagery; imagery that has become a powerful propaganda tool over recent years, exploiting the communication power of the internet, where images are instantly and anonymously uploaded to be flashed around the world. These staged sets have become a genre of their own - but these are not actors and the story lines are all too real.
Such images provoke an emotional reaction – we fear for the hostage and empathise with their terrible situation, knowing that their future may well be bleak. Their lives hang in the balance as they are shown to the world - making, often futile, appeals to be saved. We watch, feeling powerless to change their fate.
Hostage to his cravings, and, by extension, a hostage to himself, the addict effectively holds a gun to his own head on a path of self-destruction. Often there is little that we can do but watch, feeling powerless to change his fate. The fate of the hostage lies with the hostage-taker.
Rob Jinman (March 2010)