beyond cenotaphs
What does it mean, in 2009, to represent the facts, acts and consequences of war? This exhibition will provide ideas and images around the issues of war and how and for what reasons a war, or wars, are memorialised.
You define the war, the site and propose a war memorial. This can be entirely your own devising, or can be drawn from a current competition such as the Canadian Navy monument, or it can be a reworking of an inadequate existing memorial. It can be a traditional object, a re-signification of an existing landscape, the dissemination of a text, a performance, a new media project.
The exhibition will form a complement to On Site issue 22::WAR (in print, late Fall 2009). We are most interested in registering how people today feel that war might be effectively marked. What comes after the cenotaph, or Maya Lin’s walls, or wartime memory websites, to honour the participants in war, to validate or invalidate war, to prevent war, to rally to war, to mark war? On Site 22 will be commenting on the leftover landscapes of war, urbicide, monuments, dark tourism, ad hoc memorials, the walls of partition, reconstruction. This exhibition proposes new work, where form rather than text offers the commentary.
New entries are welcome, two pages maximum, send as a pdf.
And if anyone sent in a sumission at the end of October and it hasn't appeared, please send it again as our server unnaccountably chose that weekend to do some massive server transfer and not much mail came through.
To view this exhibition, with entries arranged alphabetically by last name, please click here, or on war memorials below. Clicking on any of the thumbnail images will take you to a full screen version.
