“Producing many texts and projects on the war in Ukraine, I cannot shake the feeling that I am working in the genre of disaster porn.” So wrote Ukrainian critic and curator Alisa Lozhkina in April, in a post titled ‘We Are Only Seen When We Die: Notes on the War and Art in Ukraine’. We are inundated with images from the Russia-Ukraine conflict through art, news and many other media: recently, Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky even appeared as a hologram at a conference in Paris. Representation is everything when it comes to making a political difference, yet the endless portrayal of the war does not seem to bring peace any closer.
Perplexed by the testimony of horror, glorious spectatorship and disaster porn that meet in images of war, I decided to look at some major works of war art to see if art has made any real difference to war, and our ideas about it. How has mass media and technology – apparently meant to make the viewer more informed – affected our way of seeing?
From art as propaganda to art as reflection and anti-war protest, I’ve looked at how far artistic representation of war – and its effect on viewers – is an effective tool for both inciting and preventing or stopping conflict.
