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A New Look at … On Art and War and Terror by Alex Danchev

Photographic portraits, the late Alex Danchev suggests in On Art and War and Terror (published in 2009), “are not merely illustrations of what was already known. They are new knowledge” (p. 36) and a fiction may be “a type of truth” (p. 148), requiring new thinking and writing techniques to grasp what is normally considered intangible, ephemeral, even – from the point of view of most scholarship – irrelevant. This book shows that it is not irrelevant: “art articulates a vision of the world that is insightful and consequential; and the vision and the insight can be analysed” (p. 4).

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Imageandpeace.com at Pragmatics of Peace on the Move (ZIF, Bielefeld University)

People on the Move is one of the most pressing and one of the most visualized issues of our time. While human mobility has been the subject of a huge amount of academic research, we still do not know enough about the main questions that the conference Pragmatics of Peace on the Move: Challenging Perspectives on Mobility-related Conflictivity at Bielefeld University’s prestigious Center for Interdisciplinary Research (ZIF) addressed:  how do “the peace perspectives held by individuals” relate to “forced mobility” and in what ways are these perspectives enacted?

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Exhibition review: Alfredo Jaar, The End of the World

At the end of the year, reflections on The End of the World – Alfredo Jaar’s new engagement with the capitalist-militarist exploitation of minerals. This exploitation is indispensable to digitisation, the data-based society, energy transition and ostensibly green economies. Combining private capital with state security interests, it results in intensified, ruthless violence exerted on both human beings and the natural environment, turning Earth into waste and treating human beings as dispensable, sacrificed for the pursuit of profit and national security.

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WAYS OF SHOWING PEACE (IV): the limits of disaggregation

Complexity theory alerts us to the limits of disaggregation in complex settings but research and analysis nevertheless often equal disaggregation. Because a complex social situation cannot be analyzed in its entirety, research often focusses on individual component parts of this situation, analysis of which seems manageable. Analyzing several components and subsequently assembling the results of the individual analyses, researchers hope to gain a complete picture of the overall setting or at least a picture that is as complete as possible.

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Exhibition review – Kertész, Moholy-Nagy, Capa … Hungarian Photographers in America (1914 – 1989)

Everybody remotely interested in the history of photography will immediately recognize the famous names featured in this exhibition – André Kertesz, László Moholy-Nagy, Robert Capa – and their contributions to art and photography: Bauhaus, abstraction, surrealism, photojournalism, street photography, war photography and so on. How the world appears in photography even today cannot be separated from the work of these photographers.

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