Images: The News Stand installation view, altered front pages of The New York Times, Asahi Japan, Herald Tribune England, Le Monde France, Die Ziet Germany and a major Pakistan newspaper.
The News Stand at MoMA PS1, New York, 2007.
Materials: 2 x 2,5 m photo print, milk crates & altered newspapers.
By Søren Dahlgaard, Martin Stigsgaard, Masayuki Sono & Rahul Saggar.
The main story on the front page of six major newspapers from all over the world was altered as a reaction to the dramatic weather changes, which took place in NYC that day, 18th of March 2007. This work was part of the group show Emergency Room.
Orson Welles famous Radio Broadcast from 1938: War Of The Worlds in which many listeners believed an actual alien invasion by Martians was currently in progress became the inspiration for The News Stand. The idea of manipulating a large part of the population with a lie via the mass media, as Orson Welles succeeds in doing with War Of The Worlds, was triggered after an unusually warm week in February 2007 in New York. The program’s quality of realism further lead the artistic team to take great care in producing plausible news stories about extreme weather conditions and producing realistic newsprint versions of major newspapers.
This work was made before the concept of The Anthropocene became a well-known reference point in the art world but nevertheless, sits within this critique and awareness of humanity’s impact on the environment and possible influence on extreme weather changes we currently experience globally more and more frequently.