Premio Combat Prize

That Was Then is a Single Channel 1080p Video with the actual audio reporting of the first hours of Operation Desert Storm on CNN. It takes the viewer through the initial bombing stage of Baghdad in 1991 with reporters Peter Arnett, Bernard Shaw, and John Holliman. The live coverage was significant because it was unedited and established CNN as a credible news agency and the notion of 24 news. I remember as a young man watching the CNN footage and thinking, like most everyone, that the footage looked like a video game. It appeared hyper-real. I have taken this audio and synched it with video footage that I shot at the Fourth of July fireworks display in the United States.
Prince Varughese Thomas is a Texas Biennial artist who is part of what has come to be known as the Indian Diaspora. Being Indian by birth, born in Kuwait, naturalized in the US, and raised primarily between India and the United States, I have always felt outside the dominant culture in which I exist. This sense of being the ‘Other’ has influenced how I view the world, approach my conceptual concerns, and create art. With an educational background and degrees in both Psychology and Art, I investigate and deconstruct complex sociopolitical issues from the interstices in personally expressive ways that humanize my subjects by incorporating a variety of photographic, video, and installation techniques into my artwork.
I am interested in questioning those places in culture that create divisions among people and attempt through my work to subvert those structures in ways that have been characterized as poetic moments captured in chaotic worlds.