For the artist Kader Attia (Dugny, 1970), denying the wound is keeping the pain alive, hence his eagerness to trace the scars of history and promote their repair, without which they continue to travel from generation to generation. In his Culture installation. Another Nature Repareid, the traces of war are visible in the mutilated and reconstructed faces of the gueules cassées (broken faces), the wounded soldiers of World War I that the artist has had chiseled in wood by artisans from Mali and Congo. The severed figures, testimony to the atrocity of the war, rise like ghosts in the exhibition Why War? del Born CCM (until September 29), a scene where the disasters of Barcelona devastated in 1714 are still visible.
Far from resolving conflicts, war is an engine of destabilization that opens scenarios of devastation and humanitarian crises. “So, why does it persist?” asks the historian and head of the Democratic Memorial, Jordi Font Agulló, curator of the exhibition together with the former director of the Born Marta Marín-Dòmine, while underlining its omnipresence and pointing to a terrible paradox: “War causes profound consequences in all areas, but at the same time it is a 'place' that causes fascination.”
Font Agulló and Marín-Dòmine look for answers - other visions outside the battlefield - in the world of art, “the only space of freedom we have left,” says the New York-based Chilean artist, filmmaker and architect Alfredo Jaar (Santiago de Xile, 1956), present with a series of works that question who generates the images and who decides which ones we can see. On May 1, 2011 he recovers the photograph of President Obama surrounded by the national security team, his face tense and concentrated, observing a screen that we cannot see. It was the official image distributed to the media to announce the death of Osama bin Laden. “The docility of the international press seemed despicable to me,” Jaar confesses. “Instead of showing the dead terrorist, they ask us to believe what we do not see,” says the artist, who in another more recent series, Mea culpa (2022), takes the cover of The Economist magazine about the Russian invasion of Ukraine (the blue and yellow flag with threads of blood flowing between the two colors) and reproduces it using the flags of those many other conflicts (Yemen, Syria, Ethiopia, Iraq...) that have not been the subject of great media attention.
There is no one in the Battlefields of the duo formed by María Bleda (Castellón, 1976) and José María Rosa (Albacete, 1970), but the photographs have the ability to activate what was once there: the echoes of the confrontations, the pain and blood spilled in Roncesvalles, Numancia, Navas de Tolosa, Calatañazor, Bailén, Sagunto, Villalar de los Comuneros, today converted into olive groves or wheat fields.
Fernando Sánchez Castillo (Madrid, 1970), an artist who rewrites history as a transformative and revolutionary act (he made a sculpture with the dismantled remains of the Azor, Franco's pleasure boat), shows here for the first time Ephemeral Theater, an installation that reconstructs the pyramid-shaped bunker designed by the republican architect Lino Vaamonde to protect the artistic heritage during the Civil War. The project was never realized, but throughout his forty years of exile, which began in 1939 in the Argelers camp, Vaamonde traveled from country to country without ever leaving the plans. A utopian architecture, which Castillo contrasts with the precarious architecture, made of reeds and blankets, “that protected the lives of refugees.”
Why the war? It also recovers historical works, such as the installation made with plastic soldiers by Francesc Abad (Terrassa, 1944), the photographs by Rula Halawani (Jerusalem, 1963) about the architecture that restricts the freedom of Palestinians or the testimonies in the form of sharp paintings and moving stories of protagonists of the Colombian conflict (they belonged to paramilitary groups, guerrilla movements or the Army) in the workshops promoted by Juan Manuel Echevarría (Medellín, 1947) in The War We Have Not Lived.
In Turbulent, the Iranian artist living in the United States Shirin Neshat (Qazvin, 1957) reminds us of another type of war that has to do with the place that men and women occupy in Islamic society. In the film, a woman in a chador and dressed in black performs a melody in a theater made of screams, sobs and whispers that is lost in a void of unoccupied seats. From the screen in front of her, a melodic singer who has just performed to the acclaim of an exclusively male audience watches her in amazement. (After the 1979 revolution, women in Iran are prohibited from singing alone in front of men who are not related to them because of the danger of inflaming their desire.)
