Violence, calamity and the absurdity of war are recorded extensively within The Archive of Modern Conflict, the largest photographic collection of its kind in the world. For their most recent work, Holy Bible, Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin mined this archive with philosopher Adi Ophir’s central tenet in mind: that God reveals himself predominantly through catastrophe and that power structures within the Bible correlate with those within modern systems of governance.

The format of Broomberg and Chanarin’s illustrated Holy Bible mimics both the precise structure and the physical form of the King James Version. By allowing elements of the original text to guide their image selection, the artists explore themes of authorship, and the unspoken criteria used to determine acceptable evidence of conflict.

Inspired in part by the annotations and images Bertolt Brecht added to his own personal bible, Broomberg and Chanarin’s publication questions the clichés at play within the visual representation of conflict. (Publisher)

暴力、災禍與戰爭的荒謬性最常被記錄在「現代衝突文件室」之中，它擁有此類別裡最豐富的圖像資料收藏。而在最新作品「聖經」中，藝術家Adam Broomberg 和 Oliver Chanarin運用這些資料，以及以色列哲學家Adi Ophir的中心思想：神主要藉由災難顯露自己，而由聖經中的權力結構對照出現代政府制度間的關聯性。

藝術家創作這部聖經的形式，無論在結構與實際形體上皆是準確翻製英王詹姆斯一世的欽定版。由原始文本中的元素帶領他們在圖像上的選擇，藝術家在其中探索署名權的題材、以及曾用於作為認定合適的衝突證據的潛在準則。這個構想部分且發源自布萊希特加注於自己聖經上的圖文。如同Adam Broomberg 和 Oliver Chanarin一往的創作主軸，他們玩弄視覺化上的衝突去質疑社會上的陳腔濫調。