CURATING WAR
ARTISTS
Alice Creischer & Andreas Siekmann, Ana Hoffner ex-Prvulovic*, Fatoş Irwen, Hiwa K, Georg Oberlechner, Ihsan Oturmak, Songül Sönmez, Hito Steyerl, Rojda Tuğrul.
Whether wars produce weapons, or weapons produce wars, is one of the growth questions of national arms industries. And art too does not remain passive on this subject. In their works and through their activism, artists take a stand. However, the art world also profits from war and contributes its fair share to the accumulation of capital of corporations that produce weapons and deliver them to war zones.
The exhibition Krieg kuratieren (Curating war), conceived by curator Ezgi Erol, brings international artists together whose works move along the interface between art and war. The exhibition deals with various aspects of war, the resulting conflicts, and the opportunities for action in the field of art. Some artistic positions question the economic base of the art world. Others try to find out how art shapes memory and creates a space for coping with war experiences, in order to shed light on the cultural hegemony in geopolitical spaces.
Rojda Tuğrul draws our attention to the ecological disasters caused by war and their effects on habitats and ecosystems in the Kurdish regions of Turkey. The artist Ihsan Oturmak deals with the question of power structures and searches for a form in the architectural aspects determined by war, while Songül Sönmez in her sound installation concentrates on the forensic side of war and human rights violations. The artist Fatoş Irwen, who, convicted without the least proof, has been sitting in a Turkish prison since 2016, works on the subjects of gender, vulnerability, multiple discrimination and power. Hiwa K, on the other hand, looks at aspects of the historic coming to terms with wars, in this case the Iran-Iraq War (1980–1988) and the two Gulf Wars (1991, 2003), through the handling of the rests of war materials exported and deployed by many arms manufacturers. Starting with the main sponsor of the Istanbul Biennial, Hito Steyerl raises fundamental questions on the art industry and the financing of museums and their relations to arms production. The artist Ana Hoffner ex-Prvulovic* too retraces the connections between institutional, collection and war politics by looking at the share of the Thyssen corporation in the profits from the arms industry and contemporary art, e.g. through the TBA21 (Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary) art collection. Alice Creischer and Andreas Siekmann provide an insight into conflicts by way of tables on mine producers and exports of the German arms industry and in their contribution trace the drawing up of territorial and national boundaries. And finally, in his film Das Wachtelkönig Paradox (The Corncrake Paradox), screened in the context of the exhibition, Georg Oberlechner depicts, among other things, Austrian national identity constructs and the presentation of military equipment in the context of the annual national entertainment on National Day, October 26, on Heldenplatz in Vienna.
Krieg kuratieren (Curating war) at Kunstraum Innsbruck is the second edition of the exhibition. The show, curated by Ezgi Erol, was first presented on the occasion of the Wienwoche festival 2018, under the artistic direction of Ivana Marjanović and Nataša Mackuljak.
