Dark Was the Night

The explosions in Dark Was the Night are not generic detonations. They are white phosphorus munitions — an incendiary agent whose use over populated areas is restricted under international humanitarian law, precisely because it cannot distinguish between combatant and civilian. Segard draws its bloom at the moment of ignition — charcoal ground into dust, worked into dyed cloth until the burst reads, from a distance, as something almost celestial.

That distance is the subject. Set at a remove, lit against a night sky, a phosphorus strike resembles fireworks before it resembles an atrocity — and it is watched that way: from hilltops, with folding chairs, snacks, binoculars, the ordinary furniture of an audience settling in for a show. The blast becomes entertainment for the body that isn’t under it. This is the corrosive core of the work: not the beauty of the mark charcoal makes on cloth, but the fact that a weapon built to burn indiscriminately can, from a safe enough distance, be enjoyed. Dehumanisation here is not a metaphor — it is the literal mechanism by which someone else’s incineration becomes a person’s evening out.

Dark Was the Night refuses to let that mechanism stay comfortable. It withholds the vantage point, the chair, the safe distance — insisting instead that this light, however it is composed, is not a star. It is a wound rendered legible only by being set on fire.

Ankan Kazi’s essay on the exhibition is at Dark Was The Night.