HLS-F71 /

FELIX
KALMEN
SON

HLS-F71 / Felix Kalmenson

2014 The New Gallery Press
Printed in Canada
Designed and edited by Steven Cottingham, featuring
contributions by Xenia Benivolski and Felix Kalmenson. All
photos courtesy the artist, the gallery, and the internet.
ISBN 978-1-895284-13-3
thenewgallery.org/
208 Centre St S, Calgary, AB

XENIA BENIVOLSKI is an artist and curator living and working

in Toronto, Canada. She graduated from the Ontario College
of Art and Design with multiple scholarships and awards in
2008. Xenia is the founder of The Whitehouse: a 26 artist
studio residency space in Torono, and comprises a third of the
contemporary art platform LUFF. Recently she has completed
two fully funded residencies in Alberta, Canada. In 2011, she
curated the exhibition Mistica Canadiese in Museo de Ciudad
in Queretaro, Mexico. The second volume of her publication
project Rearviews will be available at Printed Matter, NY in
2014.
STEVEN COTTINGHAM has worked as Programming
Coordinator at The New Gallery since 2012.
HLS-F71 was an exhibition by Felix Kalmenson in The New
Gallerys Main Space (208 Centre St SE) from January 10 to
February 22, 2014.
FELIX KALMENSON is a Toronto-based artist who works
in installation, film, photography, books, and performance
within public spaces and gallery settings. His work engages
in conversations surrounding publicness, memory, mediation,
and how these topics are activated by complex socioeconomic landscapes. Kalmenson completed his Bachelors of
Architecture and Urban Studies at the University of Toronto in
2011. He has exhibited in solo and curated group exhibitions in
Canada and internationally.

HLS-F71 is an immersive installation which seeks to explore

the experience of trauma associated with military conflict and
representations of trauma mediated by images, sounds, and
stories. Drawing a parallel between the Gulf War and the
currently ongoing Civil War in Syria, HLS-F71 investigates
how new methods of communication have re-shaped the way
conflict is understood through mass media and how the trauma
of these conflicts is collectively reconciled.
HLS-F71 uses the Twitter feed of the pro-rebel group The
Local Coordination Committees of Syria from the period
of January 10 to February 22, 2012 as a score to activate
fifteen loudspeakers blaring the recorded sounds of the
HLS-F71 air raid siren used in Israel during the gulf war. This
is underscored by an FM transmission of audio from videos
of demonstrations, clashes, and other scenes culled from the
YouTube channels of individual activists and journalists within
Syria. The sounds of traumatic conflict uploaded by pro-FSA
Syrian citizens will linger silently in the invisible transmissions
of the space and surrounding area. These unheard sounds will
be accessible by locating the radio frequency.
The Syrian Civil War is unprecedented in the sheer volume,
scope, and decentralization of information, images, storytelling,
and the readiness with which one can consume the conflict
from anywhere in the world. However, the very mediation of
that conflict through manipulated historical narratives is central
to the way we experience this particular cultural trauma,
providing us with frames of reference. As remote viewers, we
can only absorb these images with an abstract empathy: an
abstract notion of trauma, announced by the wail of air raid
sirens.
The use of pro-FSA and pro-rebel media outlets in this
installation is not partial to either side of the conflict in Syria. It
aims to examine the mediation of military action by individuals
and non-state and non-institutional actors. A historical
perspective is used to focus on a particular time in the Assad
regime.

3 / DRAMATIS PERSON

HLS-F71 / 4

THE SILE
NCE OF
SIRENS

an essay by Xenia Benivolski

In a brief chronicle on earnest moralistic solutions to
complicated issues in Homers Odyssey, Franz Kafka wrote:
Now the Sirens have a still more fatal weapon than their
song, namely their silence. And though admittedly such a
thing never happened, it is still conceivable that someone
might possibly have escaped from their singing; but from
their silence certainly never.
According to Kafkas analysis of the myth,1 while the siren call
was an invitation to certain death, it is silence that catalyzes
their murderous activity: where call ends and action begins.
In Felix Kalmensons project, HLS-F71, one encounters
fifteen active air raid siren towers activated by a score of
Syrian resistance tweets from the group Local Coordination
Committees of Syria between January 10 and February 22,
2012. Though the two groups of sirens seemingly share little
but an etymological base, a common gulf is breached with the
reminder of the implications of silence: in Syria, the air raid
sirens that are silenced by the government involved in a civil
conflict with its citizens are deadlier than ever as symbols of
civic failure. This paradoxical situation is of personal interest
to Kalmenson; an artist who lived in Israel and encountered
cultural trauma on a national scale. Constantly defined by
a traumatic past that is both oppressive and empowering
to its people, Israel is a nation whose economy is driven by
military industry and maintained by conflict and foreign aid.
Furthermore, in Israel, air raid sirens are used whenever
a commemorative minute of silence is in ordersuch as
on Veterans Day, or Holocaust Remembrance Day (Yom
HaShoah). In those moments, the wail of the siren fills the air
while people must stand still. The sirens are also present when
an important military figure dies: a reminder of the collective
trauma of militarization, filtered through the experience of
individual suffering, and vice versa. The sound device
becomes a powerful tool of re-traumatization, a reminder of
military struggle and victimhood. In Kalmensons project, the
siren sounds to the track of the Syrian conflict as it unfolded on

THE SILENCE OF SIRENS / XENIA BENIVOLSKI / 6

Twitter between January and February of 2012. To articulate

the past historically does not mean to recognize it the way it
really was, said Walter Benjamin, in reference to historical
perspective.2 The silence between alarms is punctuated
by the soundtracks to unseen videos of demonstrations,
crackdowns, and martyred Syrians. These sounds fill the silent
spaces between air raid sirens to reflect the individualized
suffering endured by victims of war and mediate the space
under and between the sounds of the HLS-F71 alarms. This
tension between individual and collective global experiences is
perhaps one of the keys to enter this work.
Kalmensons installation is as much about the role of social
media as a catalyst, an archive, a witness, and a decentralized
mediator in military conflict as it is an attempt to bring the
formal elements of a contemporary traumatic event from a
reality foreign to most Canadians onto a platform open to both
aesthetic and humanitarian critique in Western society. In
the age of fast moving technology, the time elapsed between
a real-time event and its exposure to the masses is minute.
Historically, there has been a lag between a traumatic event
and worldwide response for trauma to properly form within a
cultural constructa necessary delay before the appearance
of the memory trace (in a group) or the neurotic symptom in
the individual. Prevalent individual web reportage in Syria
has been a defining practical feature of the Syrian resistance
movement: swift abundance of information raised the
traumatic potential of Arab Spring events to significant cultural
and historical crescendo, suggesting a real new cultural
axis outside of the monolith of the West, one that reports
overarching issues without trivializing the realities of traumatic
events. The use of 2012s attack and detainment records as
a score is an attempt to properly archive reportage activity
that is then reenacted on dramatic terms, allowing for the
aforementioned delay, exported from its origin.
The cultural export of trauma is not a new subject. According
to Summerfields controversial document, The invention of
post-traumatic stress disorder and the social usefulness of the
psychiatric category in The BMJ,3 PTSD is essentially

THE SILENCE OF SIRENS / XENIA BENIVOLSKI / 8

a Western construct that imposed a medical model on the

suffering of people in war situations, thus encouraging the
emergence of a trauma industry that can be exported to any
culture. Two radical axis pull at the traumatic paradoxthe
aforementioned individual/collective experience is mirrored
by the heroic human survival versus the inhuman element
activity which tends to be political, organized, resource-driven,
and inevitably violent. In psychoanalysis, the analogy between
what is happening at the collective level and what is going on
at the individual level establishes a connection between the
culture and the psyche, a connection which today lies at the
heart of the politics of trauma: the collective event supplies the
substance of the trauma which will be articulated in individual
experience; in return, individual suffering bears witness to
the traumatic aspect of the collective drama. Simultaneously:
trauma in itself is a testimony to what happened to the human.
But it is also a testimony that bears witness to the persistence
of the human, even in those extreme situations that threaten
to dehumanize the victims. At the core of this system, the
individual sufferer and survivor are identified as a symbol of
spirit. The victim, oppressor, and witness are all given the
equalizing definition of traumatized on an individual level,
while a collective needing force eventually concedes to the
search for power, once again collapsing into the realm of antiindividual oppression.

its study sits at the centre of the constant redefinition of a

new theory of humanism; a field between historicization and
psychoanalysis, activated by resistance and survival in face of
atrocity. With the traumatic experience as a cultural and visual
tool available to us in this work, one should ask themselves if
the footage from Syria is in fact serving a humanistic purpose
of upholding a global outrage, of reminding us of survival, and
of convincing us of the power of the human spirit, and if that
is done in the interest of furthering the historicization of the
human as both creator and destroyer, radically and endlessly
re-establishing new global centres.

The technological aspects of the Arab Spring movement

made it so any ordinary citizen can report on the realities of
the war with or without the interference of larger mediators.
This caused the decentralization of the journalistic act, which
both highlighted agendaed thinking in government and state
reportage and obscured the larger humanistic cause of social
revolution. The result is nation-wide cultural trauma upheld
by a myriad of footage reflecting widely diverse personal
and collective instances of oppression. Since the boundaries
between individual oppression and the oppressed have been
lost, one could say that Syria is boiling with trauma, thus
betraying the historical narrative of functional trauma and
its use for life and being. Because of these tensions, as a
cog subject in both contemporary politics and art, trauma and

9 / THE SILENCE OF SIRENS

XENIA BENIVOLSKI / 10

NOTES

BIBLIOGRAPHY

The Silence of the Sirens (Das Schweigen der Sirenen)

is a short story by Franz Kafka published after his death.
The story reasserts the dynamic between the sirens and
Odysseus as paradoxical: while Odysseus had chosen
to experience the sirens by blocking his ears, the sirens
had stopped singing. However, he was not able to hear
the deadly silence due to his blocked ears. The story is
summarized as a comment on the futility of complicated
approaches. In Kafkas words: Inadequate, even childish
measures, may rescue one from peril.

Benjamin, Walter, (1940). On the Concept of History

Gesammelten Schriften I:2. Suhrkamp Verlag. Frankfurt
am Main, 1974.

The twelve paragraph essay, Benjamins last before

his suicide in 1940ironically in response to imminent
capture by the Nazi forcescontains an apt reference to
Angelus Novus, Paul Klees 1920 painting The Angel of
History. Here, the eponymous figure turns his back turned
to the future as a metaphor for historicism and progress.
Where we see the appearance of a chain of events, he
sees one single catastrophe, which unceasingly piles
rubble on top of rubble and hurls it before his feet, that
which we call progress, is this storm. The essay rejects
the Marxist notion that Historical Materialism will bring
revolution, saying it does nothing but save the past.

Summerfield, D. (2001). The invention of post-traumatic stress

disorder and the social usefulness of a psychiatric
category. British Medical Journal 322(7278): 95-98.

The controversial document by Summerfield, an

international expert on trauma, is critical of the
overabundance of medical diagnoses relating post
traumatic stress disorder, making of example of Freetown,
Sierra Leone, where a survey of 245 randomly selected
individuals resulted in a diagnosis of over 99% of
participants with post traumatic stress disorder: rendering
PTSD clinically irrelevant, seeking to convert human
suffering and misery into technical terms.

11 / THE SILENCE OF SIRENS

Kafka, Franz, (1931). The Complete Stories. Schocken Books;

Reprint edition, 1995.
Rechtman, Richard, Fassin, Didier, (2009). The Empire of
Trauma: An Inquiry into the Condition of Victimhood.
Princeton University Press; 1st edition (July 6, 2009).

XENIA BENIVOLSKI / 12

ACCEPT
ABLE LE
VELS OF
UNTRUT
H

a Facebook Chat conversation between Felix Kalmenson and

Steven Cottingham
Tuesday 1:05 PM
SC Hey, let me know if youre around for an interview/
conversation today!
Tuesday 2:11 PM
FK Hey Steven tomorrow is better for me. Judith Butler is
lecturing right now!
Did u hear the podcast yet?
SC Sure, tomorrow works!
Yes, just heard it, were going to post it on fb.
FK Great! What did u think?
SC I really like your description of the parallels/differences
between Syria and the Gulf War. I think its a good
interview, succinct and informative. The order they edited it
in is a little weird, but its good. Im glad it worked out. How
did you feel?
FK It was a weird experience doing it but I think the result
was pretty good. Its weird hearing my voice in a produced
radio piece. They did however cut off the part were I talk
about the cynical use of trauma by states. But whatever
its a short piece and a lot to talk about and personal war
narratives are sexier than politics.
Wednesday 3:31 PM
SC Ive got an hour now.
FK Ok lets do it, i just had a coffee!
SC Okay!
So, you were asking about viewers reactions to the

FELIX KALMENSON / STEVEN COTTINGHAM / 14

piece, and I was wondering what you hoped your work

would incite? And, like, what do you want art to do in the
world?
FK hmm
I was hoping the work would incite two reactions. The first
would an overwhelming sense of trauma and empathy,
and then an examination of those emotions.
SC What happens when you examine those emotions?
FK In examining the source of that emotion I hope people
would question and challenge the power of images
in translating trauma and eliciting empathy. That they
would walk away with a keener sense of doubt when
confronted with images of trauma and ask of themselves
the questions that they hopefully ask of themselves when
confronted with say, political ads: Who created this? Why
am I seeing it? What is the motive of the media producer?
What is my privilege or position as a viewer and potential
stakeholder?
SC Do you think that experience will translate to political
ads, when those are so crisp and clean and an almost
imperceptible part of daily society, and your selection of
YouTube videos and tweets are jarring in their removal
from our life?
*By our life I mean, mine, my peers, and, in some way, a
great deal of western culture.
FK I want HLS-F71 to translate trauma and build empathy/
awareness for a conflict the way photojournalism does,
but also to question that very process in a media literacy
sense. Syria is an overwhelmingly complex and important
global conflict that warrants thought and attention by
western stakeholders. Furthermore there is a Syrian
community in Calgary that deserves solidarity and support
and building awareness is one step towards that.

17 / ACCEPTABLE LEVELS OF UNTRUTH

FK sorry thats still part of that last question.

SC maybe we can build on that
FK Also I just want to touch a little more on your first question
quickly
SC sure
Wednesday 3:52 PM
FK In terms of what I want art to do in the world, this is
something Im constantly grappling with and increasingly
frustrated by. I want art to communicate meaningfully
meaningful things. I think art and design have been
confused in many circles and have resulted in a depoliticization that has been marked in other previously
fertile sites of struggle against oppression (i.e. anti-cancer
activism [see Pink Ribbon, NFB] or mainstreamed queer
communities [The omission of Queers Against Israeli
Apartheid from the Pride Parade in Toronto]). Art has
undergone a process of normalization that has neatly
integrated it into existing economic and social orders. I
want to challenge normalization, to challenge established
structures and frameworks, to use its communicative
potential to highlight challenging ideas.
FK But to go back to your last question...The great thing
about media literacy is that it can teach you to look beyond
and be suspicious of gloss, of smoothness. I think many
people are inherently suspicious, the adage all politicians
are liars is probably a good indication of that, but you are
right that it is hard to deconstruct symbols of power and
manipulative images in daily life, especially when there are
established distributors of truth (the news) that cynically
misuse their position.
SC yeah. I think, definitely, youve accomplished or made
gestures towards that, here. Using YouTube and
commonly accessible online materials and bringing them

FELIX KALMENSON / STEVEN COTTINGHAM / 18

just one step closer to an uninterested audience.

The gesture of bringing forth is important, I think. Even
though ignorance and disinterest persist.
FK Thats why media literacy is more important now more
than ever, especially with the relatively unmediated stream
of information on the internet.
SC Yeah. Like, we talk a lot about post-internet or whatever,
or how it is ceasing to become a novelty and is a more
fully integrated part of life (or certain lives), but, still, seeing
the aftereffects of conflict in your YouTube stream makes
it so clear that there are vast portions of life that exist
beyond the internet in ways we never comprehended.
FK I try not to position my audience too much in relation to
established knowledges. There were individuals with a
personal experience of Syria that was exceedingly more
valid and nuanced than my own. But the bringing forth
was essentially what I was trying to do; it is very much a
journalistic/archival project.
FK I think the most powerful thing you can do sometimes is
merely present something.
FK And to speak to your last point, it is true that while the
internet has been a good tool for bearing witness it is
limited in its perspective and range to individuals who have
privileged access. While access is the only qualifier you
need to partake in global/local discourses online, access
is not universal and is restricted by income, geographic
location, incarceration, governmental intervention and
a myriad of other factors. To talk about a global online
community is to talk about a stratified global geography of
class, position and visibility.
SC I was wondering if you felt confronted by any of the moral
ambiguities that plague journalistic-ish vocations ... like,
the prerequisite of a certain amount of privilege to be
able to curate and present the lives of others. Especially

FELIX KALMENSON / STEVEN COTTINGHAM / 20

marginalized others. Is it exploitative?

FK I think it is all about how it is presented and what is
presented. In HLS-F71 I have a very limited curatorial
framework and am merely creatively presenting the
archives of the Local Coordination Committees of Syria.
The videos, words and sounds are made by Syrians for
Syrians as well as for the international community. I would
personally feel uncomfortable as an artist/journalist going
to Syria and making images that claim to represent the
people or the conflict present there. And in many cases
journalists can become an integral part, either intentionally
or unintentionally, of problematic narratives, bolstering
the ambitions of expanding global powers. This is exactly
why I introduced the Gulf War narrative into this work,
because it was a conflict where 24 hour video journalism
from CNN and other western outlets led to problematic
framing of an interventionist conflict. They essentially
relayed the US Militarys framing of the conflict as a moral
one and skirted issues surrounding power struggles over
oil fields and regional outposts. Take the Highway of
Death (Gulf War incident) for instance, hundreds of Iraqis
and Palestinians were massacred in a resentment-incited1
carpet-bombing while attempting a hasty retreat from
Kuwait City. This was without a doubt an atrocity and a
violation of the Geneva Convention that protects retreating
armies from assault. However, when confronted with a PR
nightmare, the US government hastened to reframe the
event as a battle against armed retreat despite evidence
suggesting that the majority of the vehicles involved were
civilian. Western media outlets adopted the narrative and
in their reportage focused on images of the handful of
armed vehicles, selectively editing out the overwhelming
presence of decimated civilian vehicles and underreporting
the casualties.
FK At the same time, though, journalists are an integral part
of how individuals come to understand global issues and
their relation to those issues. In many cases conflicts that
are occurring in marginalized zones have international

FELIX KALMENSON / STEVEN COTTINGHAM / 22

stakeholders manipulating the distribution of resources,

access and power. By gaining knowledge of this complex
set of interrelationships individuals could challenge power
in their own states and how that power is exercised
internationally.
But getting back your question, I think if the privileged
access that a journalist has is used to expose and
challenge power and oppression it is an acceptable
vocation. But I am a western individual now living in
Canada in relative comfort so my opinion isnt much of a
qualifier in this specific avenue of thought.
SC The idea of privilege is one I struggle with, too. Not sure
how to address it, especially not in a direct way, but I think
its possible that adopting the position of an engaged
observer or listener is a meaningful way to contribute to
the world.
FK Agreed. I also think that the internet has precipitated
the conditions for individuals in the global periphery
(locational, class-based, bodily marginalization/
oppression) to engage actively and directly with broader
audiences in their own words and on their own terms. In
some cases it is just a wilful ignorance of these networks
by westerners that prevents any meaningful connection
with western bodies. And in some other cases access and
visibility is limited as a condition of zealous and paranoid
governments who are worried about their image, as with
Assads shutting down of the internet and disruptions
to wireless connections in Egypt during anti-Mubarak
protests. So there are cases where outside assistance
is necessary, even if just as messengers or facilitators.
Groups like Telecomix for instance circulating methods to
circumvent state blockages on internet networks during
the Egypt 2011 revolution.
Not too mention people who are killed or imprisoned and
are therefore excluded from the public sphere. These
people in many cases need a bridge to the broader
community.
This is sometimes communicated internally, like Judith

FELIX KALMENSON / STEVEN COTTINGHAM / 24

Butler said last night at the talk, through hunger strikes. Or

rather articulated internally to a broader audience.
SC I also wanted to ask, why are you pulling from 2012s
archive of materials and social detritus to power the
installation?
I guess, in some ways this denies the liveness of social
media, but also draws from its own archive, an archive that
is ignored when we only pay attention to the present, the
things currently appearing in our streams.
It also allows a viewer the opportunity to compare and
contrast 2012/2014 in the conflict. It urges one to view the
current state of the observation tweet feed or the YouTube
accounts.
But, like, what do you think?
FK Well, I think historical distance is always important in
considering the present. As an amateur student of history
I try to trace back contemporary conflicts and see how
the roots of contemporary conflicts are grounded in
broader historical narratives of empire and oppression.
This is usually helpful in understanding the positions of
stakeholders. In many ways if I presented the conflict as
it is now would be to skip to the middle (or hopefully the
end). By going back to a point when the conflict was still
localized in Syria proper, I hope to give a more holistic
view of the conflict (transdisciplinary). Politics and conflict
change so quickly in a digital age, history is constantly
rearticulated and our relation to this continuity is sporadic
at best. People establish firm opinions on complex issues
after reading 500-word buzz pieces without consideration
of historically rooted inequities and power relations,
environmental conditions, a multitude of complexities.
Being able to pause and consider something historically
and this is a very telling aspect of our culture that two
years is historicalaffords us a perspective approaching
reality or truth.
In many ways liveness has established unreasonable
expectations between individuals and the world around
them. [Truth now or no truth at all!] Things are more

FELIX KALMENSON / STEVEN COTTINGHAM / 26

readily accepted as truth because of the virtue of being

the first to report it, as is the case with the misreporting
of the Supreme Court decision on the Affordable Care
Act and the myriad of other instances where CNN, Fox,
The Huffington Post or any other such media outlet has
falsely represented ill-researched, hastily conceived
reports as fact. It has created a populace comfortable with
an acceptable level of untruth, leading in many cases to
collectively lived unreality (i.e. climate change deniers).

FK kk! Have a nice night too!

SC :)

Wednesday 5:51 PM
SC That makes me think of the discussions around the
division between journalists who have to (theoretically)
fact-check before publishing and the collective hive mind
of twitter that is comprised of thousands of first-hand
accounts of the same events.
So, in a way you are occupying that space. Journalistically
directing the collectivebecoming, slightly, a member of a
greater hive mind beyond yourself.
I have to go soon. Any last thoughts for now?
FK I just want to add that the Local Coordination Committees
of Syria was chosen specifically because they are diligent
about fact-checking figures and claims, so while they are
twitter activated they engage in journalistic ethics. So
they certainly navigate that midway point between large
institutional media frameworks and hive mind reportage.
They represent the positive potential of new technologies
to broker a truth that is outside or parallel to hegemonic
narratives.
NOTE
SC Thats good to know, thanks.
In the gallery, the siren just went off.
FK Great convo!
SC Yeah, thanks so much!
Hope you have a good night, well talk more sooooon!

27 / ACCEPTABLE LEVELS OF UNTRUTH

The commander sent the pilots into battle with the latest
news report. A missile had just hit, a barracks in Dhahran
and that 60 or so servicemen were killed and our
mission was to go up and stop the retreating forces as
they left Kuwait City, and he said put some hate in your
heart and hell be waiting here when we get back.
Lt. Col Werrick Krause, F-15 pilot

FELIX KALMENSON / STEVEN COTTINGHAM / 28

THE NEW
GALLERY
PRESS /
2014