Wartime Rape Performances

According to the lyrics of the well-known Polish soldiers’ song, war is a woman who is followed by ‘brylcreem boys’. How art and literature contributes to feminization of the sources of war? How the feminisation of war contributes to producing pornographic images of women who in fact suffer rape and other atrocities? Motifs of sexual crimes and murder connected with the reality of the First World War were used by artists in the Weimar Republic. In the 1990’s, Jenny Holzer, Katarzyna Kozyra, Zbigniew Libera and many other artists defended the victims of rape during the war in the Balkans. Theere were political scandals connected with war-rape. Politicians often play dirty games connected with the problem. Recently, Russian authorities considered as ‘an act of hooliganism’the fact of exhibiting a piece of sculpture entitled Komm Frau by George Bohdan Szumczyk which showed the Red Army soldier as rapist. Even some feminist activists considered the exhibition as ‘political instrumentalization of rape’. Art does not always effectively a form of pornography. For centuries, men used the idea of rape as an element of rivarly between themselves