We Happy Few is an artwork by Claire Haslam which explores structures and meaning and their relationships to perspective and ideology, power and memory.
We Happy Few is an attempt to make, in photographic form, a structuralist critique of Western engagement with Iraq. The work comprises two triptychs which engage with signification as a practice through which meaning becomes possible. It explores the idea that an action or an event becomes detatched from the 'real' by repeated signification and re-signification until the signified is no longer part of the 'real' but only another sign.
We Happy Few addresses the struggle for knowledge in the face of this loss of 'the real'.
It explores our conditions of seeing and how they shape and delimit what we can see and understand, and how new meaning can be formed and celebrated.
