The Images of War

Bonniers Konsthall inaugurates September 19th The Image of War, an exhibition that looks at the tripartite relationship between those who do the depicting, those who are being depicted and those who then see what’s been depicted. There’s a certain contestation between an obligation to bear witness and complexities of representation when it comes to the violence of war. If for the sake of evidence and testimony it must be made an image, does it come to represent a call for representation? Is it ultimately the commitment of making the image that is foregrounded? And does the image then work out of what’s taken to be especially tragic; violence denied an image? If so, is the image of war a lesser of two evils and thus relatively good? Or does its visualization determine a tolerance toward production and viewership? To ask does not negate the necessity to create images of violence. To find ways of seeing violence is a crucial political project. What it suggests, rather, is that across an image complex that includes violence that is denied an image we must understand a double mode of transmission; on the one hand the demonstrative, that which is capable of being shown; and on the other hand the unspeakable, the inaccessible. Omitting the documentary while mirroring the inundating flow of imagery in old and new media outlets by presenting a great number of works the focus of this exhibition is artworks that grapple with questions of the image and reflect on the violence of war in tandem. In part to view how artists have worked with subjects like witnessing, monuments and evidence, but also because while journalists, fighters, activists, citizens, or satellite and surveillance cameras might depict it, what art can do is work through the image of war and call into question its representation, deepening our understanding of such imagery and its part in shaping a political stance to conflict. Especially today, as contemporary artists who not only portray but explore the image and its consequential politics have replaced the war-painters of old