Art of Peace: Art After War

The stars of the exhibition Art of Peace: Art After War are veterans of the Bosnian War, judging young actors trying out for parts in Mladen Miljanović’s film The Final Battle (2024). The scenes they are auditioning for are the circumstances that left the real veterans disabled and traumatised. Two amputees teach actors half their age how to perform stepping on a mine. Parents pick an actor to play their wheelchair-bound son, the ‘final battle’ played out every day by a family trying to cope with a cycle of poverty and disability.

This generational experience of war, the gulf of experience between those who survived and those born into former war zones, is the shared trauma of the artists in Art of Peace. Film and photography are the most effective mediums when grappling with the legacy of violence. Two series of black and white photographs by Bernardino Soares capture the aftereffects of East Timor’s occupation by Indonesia. Fitar (Scar) (2016), documents the scars left by bullets and what look like machete wounds on the bodies of massacre survivors. The other series, Mehi Aa’t (Nightmare) (1999-2006), restages an event he remembers from childhood, the murder of his teacher by the Indonesian military in front of his class. In one picture, blood is smeared on walls and in another, school chairs are scattered across the room, empty of the children who have presumably fled the scene.

It was extraordinary to see Soares and other Timorese artists speak of Indonesia as a friend and neighbour to their liberated country of Timor-Leste, a forgiveness hard won after a brutal occupation.^[1] The Timorese put the exhibition’s message into focus: it is about living in the aftermath of war, but with a commitment to peace. In The Final Battle, veterans from opposite sides of the conflict embrace, joke and laugh. 

The show also features the star of Timorese art Maria Madeira, who represented Timor-Leste in their inaugural Venice pavilion in 2024. Something went wrong with the installation of her work here, however. Well…No (2024) is made up of strands of tais, a Timor-Leste traditional handwoven fabric arranged in a blearily white room. The overall vision is of a work about wells where Timorese women would come to gossip, drawing water while trading local news. The well in the middle of the gallery, however, is built of foam bricks while the tais are wound onto supermarket BBQ skewers. The whole thing feels like a mock-up, a trial run, and one that Western Australia’s state gallery might have rectified with some less readymade materials. Concrete or mud bricks for example might help evoke something of Timor’s natural and cultural world, and better structure the viewing of tais as a material distinct to women on the island nation.

It is strange to see the ad-hoc curation of Madeira’s work alongside otherwise excellent installations. Adela Jušić’s work builds a portrait of the 1395-day siege of Sarajevo with an arrangement of projections, televisions and sound recordings. The Sniper Interviewed (no date) is a short video of a sniper describing what it was like to pick off civilians as they moved around the city, while a second archival scene Civilian Shot by a Sniper (no date) shows someone who has just been shot in Sarajevo’s streets. In Shooter Ready (2016) Jušić cleans her father’s rifle as she did during the war. He was a sniper, coming home between shifts, before being shot and killed by an enemy sniper. Shooter Ready offers a surreal memorial to Jušić’s childhood. The filmic and photographic are rich in affect here, as is the appearance of a United Nations truck on the streets of Sarajevo, a haunting reminder of the perverse role of the international organisation in each of these wars.

In the show’s third zone of post-war peace, Rwanda, United Nations’ peacekeeping troops witnessed the 1994 genocide unfold from their camps. While occupation (Timor) and war (Bosnia) fit the general pattern of state violence in the twentieth century, Rwanda’s legacy is a more difficult one, as the artists contemplate that their parents and their parent’s generation participated in or survived the killing and rape of one outnumbered ethnicity (the Tutsis and their supporters) by another, the Hutus. Cedric Mizero’s Protection (2019) is a memorial to those lost to the killings, an angelic, wearable pair of wings made from rosary beads. At the public symposium, Mizero spoke of victims holding their rosaries even as their bodies lay naked in churches or in the streets, clinging to religion and ritual even when all was lost.

The weakness in this assemblage, in the juxtaposition of post-war traumas, is that we look upon these works as reflecting specifically upon their places and times. The angel wings and rosary, tais and water well, construct a comparative rather than coherent curatorial vision. The fragmentation reflects the exhibition’s origins in an academic research project led by Curtin-based war art scholar Kit Messham-Muir, its case studies refusing to transcend their particular symbolic universes.

It may be, however, that this kind of exhibition is true to our historical moment, as a totalising vision of peace becomes increasingly impossible to imagine while perpetual wars rage across the world. Peace last had currency as a global idea during the 1990s when neo-liberals were celebrating the globalisation of capital, and before that during the 1960s as anti-Vietnam War protests anchored a revolution in leftist, Western cultural thinking. Today neither capitalism nor mass protest have been able to resolve the wars in Ukraine or Gaza, Rwanda or Sudan.

Failures are, however, typically more interesting than successes in the artworld, where a seamless exhibition usually defers to familiar cultural tropes, playing the game its audience already recognises. The aesthetic fractures in Art of Peace embody the problem named by the show’s title, which is the collapse of our capacity to imagine a world after war. Its artists reflect a more general experience in which we are all secondary witnesses, implicated within a war machine that shifts from one nation-state to the next, from Iraq to Syria or Chechnya to Palestine. It is as if we are riding in the armoured United Nations ambulance that arrives on screen in Civilian Shot by a Sniper to take the sniper’s victim away, seeing through slatted windows, unable to comprehend what we see outside. To be a secondary witness is to be incapable of affecting war as it unfolds around us, but it is also a deeply personal experience, in which we are both inside history and outside it.