“Conflict is over! Peace has not but begun” is the seemingly contradictory title of the exhibition that brings collectively the works of 15 artists who replicate on the results of and the pictures produced by wars. Paraphrasing the title, we will ask when wars finish, can we are saying peace begins? The tip of a battle and the sealing of a peace treaty solely pose stable and lasting situations if the concept of peace is shared, and subsequently require dialogue and customary understanding between the events. Nonetheless, speaking about warfare means discussing related human existence, establishments, society, economics, know-how and stability, not solely weapons. Subsequently, the exhibition brings collectively works starting from the statement of ongoing or apparently concluded conflicts, to these reflecting on the distinction between the top—or stasis—of a battle and the institution of a real situation of peace, to these referring to the premises and penalties of warfare on the entire society each now and previously. These reflections are additional explored within the two video essays by Fulvia Strano and Francesco Spampinato, commissioned by Fondazione. The primary feedback on representations of warfare in artwork historical past, together with heroic virtues, holy wars and denunciations of warfare crimes. The second takes a journey by the technological evolution of photographic methods, how this has made actuality and simulation more and more distant, altering the notion of warfare occasions by onlookers. 

The exhibition opens with the works of Ukrainian photojournalist Maxim Dondyuk, who presents an immersive set up of the photographic collection Tradition of Confrontation, Ukraine ‘22
and Between Life and Dying.
The pictures kind an excursus that begins with the times of the Orange Revolution within the streets of Kyiv and takes us all the way in which to the present entrance of the battle, to the trenches and bombed villages. Alongside Dondyuk’s unedited photographs, a range from Irish photographer Richard Mosse’s Infra collection takes us to the forests of Democratic Republic
of the Congo. Mosse, defying the classes of warfare journalism, paperwork the forgotten warfare in North Kivu, and portrays with infrared movie landscapes and moments of every day life trapped in a ghastly humanitarian tragedy. The bottom flooring concludes with two works by Terry Atkinson that bear witness to the barbarity of wars in each period—in the present day in Iraq as yesterday in Europe—and spotlight the connections between economics and warfare. 

On the primary flooring, the journey continues with the hope embodied by the primary peace flag, made in 1961 and used within the Assisi peace march by Aldo Capitini and Maria Francesca Siciliani, and now saved in Perugia. That is adopted by the work of Leon Golub, an American painter who in his lengthy profession has immediately and mercilessly depicted the dynamics of energy and violence over our bodies. Harun Farocki and Martha Rosler, alternatively, current works that replicate on the reception and understanding of the pictures that warfare creates. 

Rosler’s photomontages, echoing her historic Bringing the Conflict Dwelling collection made in the course of the Vietnam Conflict, focus on the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, and reveal how a lot the collective understanding of warfare is formed and influenced by the media. Farocki’s documentary video displays on the relationships between the act of seeing and the act of representing, between the capitalist economic system and warfare, demonstrating how know-how has made the classical conceptions of seeing and creating pictures out of date. Nonetheless, the works on show don’t solely concentrate on eventualities from energetic battle, however, as in Ran Slavin’s video, additionally navy coaching camps, now deserted with their ruins and particles.
Slavin contrasts this moon-like and desolate panorama with footage of a unadorned feminine physique as if to emphasize how each the land and the feminine physique are victims of males’s wars. Francesco Area’s work, which recycles an outdated mattress from a jail, reveals excerpts of the regimented lifetime of troopers and prisoners alike. Within the hall we cross alongside Alfredo Jaar’s neon work that quotes Gramsci and suggests how wars are born in these moments of bewilderment and transition between an outdated world we should depart and a brand new one we’ve but to construct. This new world ought to lastly be freed from nuclear weapons, as is as an alternative portrayed by Sim Chi Yin’s photographs in a journey that takes us from North Korea to U.S. nuclear missile bases. Mexican artist Pedro Reyes presents the video Beneath the Cloud that takes us to the testing grounds of nuclear bombs, whereas with the collection Disarm he makes a gesture of demilitarization, 

reworking weapons seized by the Mexican authorities from drug traffickers into musical devices. Massimo Bartolini stays within the musical dimension along with his reconstruction of the piano that American armies used to hold of their navy campaigns. A component on the heart of sociality—the piano was a device to lift the morale of the troops on the entrance—thus turning into an oblique instrument of warfare. Lastly, work by Georgian artist Eteri Chkadua take us into the on a regular basis dimension of life in warfare with its penalties and repercussions each psychological and materials. That is adopted by the show of a collection of Afghan warfare carpets reproducing the weapons of the various conflicts which have marred that land. 

On the second flooring we discover the primary igloo made by Mario Merz—Igloo di Giap—the place the phrase of the Vietnamese common Giap is written on a clay hemisphere: “If the enemy concentrates, it loses floor; if it disperses, it loses energy,” which, in Merz’s view, adjustments from a navy technique into a mirrored image on the move of energies. Lastly, a latest work by JR concludes the itinerary, which options adverse photographic prints on wooden of warfare refugee kids in a free and hopeful race towards the longer term. 

Partecipating artists:
Maxim Dondyuk, Terry Atkinson, Richard Mosse, Leon Golub, Martha Rosler, Ran Slavin, Francesco Area, Harun Farocki, Alfredo Jaar, Sim Chi Yin, Eteri Chkadua, Rugs Pedro, Reyes Massimo Bartolini, JR, Mario Merz 

at Fondazione Imago Mundi, Treviso
till September 17, 2023