Mosaic Commemorates 5,000 Americans Killed in Iraq and Afghanistan

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Source: Times Online

Josef Stalin is credited with the observation: “One death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic.” A new installation by Emily Prince suggests that 5,158 deaths — the death toll of American servicemen and women in Iraq and Afghanistan — is both.

It is impossible to read the names of the dead, each written on a piece of paper no bigger than a postcard, and still to appreciate the scale of the killing at the same time.

From a distance, American Servicemen and Women Who Have Died in Iraq and Afghanistan but not Including the Wounded, nor the Iraqis nor the Afghans, which went on show in Britain for the first time yesterday, resembles a pretty mosaic of coloured paper.

Each column represents a week in the conflict in chronological order, allowing visitors to the Saatchi Gallery in West London to see how a trickle of death beginning in October 2001 became a surge by March 2003. The pace of killing visibly lets up only during the winter, when insurgency is quelled by harsh weather conditions.

more with pictures of piece: http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/visual_arts/article6980058.ece