Bilderbuch fur Ernst Will (Ernst Will's Picture Book): A Euro Rebus (1990-93), 11:00 mins, Sydney.

The most complex and multi-layered of Callas’ CVI works, Bilderbuch focuses on the geographic continent and turbulent political history of Europe. The primary image source of the work is a children’s wartime pictorial scrapbook (or ‘bilderbuch’). Callas has described Bilderbuch für Ernst Will as an ‘electronic rendering of a form of proto-televisual iconomania’ involving the collecting and collating of seemingly random images which, when seen together, reveal underlying narratives and belief-systems. Seen in this context, images from the child’s scrapbook come together to create a startling picture of wartime Europe and its legacy.1

• 1. Rachel Kent from “Peter Callas: Initialising History, video works 1980-1999”