life and death

Life and death
and when to stop playing

Found objects
120cm x 50cm x 50cm
1992

I fold my National Defence Force call-up paper into a party hat and place it on the skull of a deceased soldier. In the late 1980s, a friend (then aged eighteen) spent some of his army service on the Angolan border and brought the skull home as macabre reminder of the lives lost in that war. He had found a skeleton, still in MPLA uniform, somewhere deep in Angolan territory during a military operation. The youth was likely killed by a splinter of shrapnel in an earlier skirmish, judging from a small opening in the forehead.

life and death