Sophie Calle, Enemy Statues, 2003
Portraits of mutilated religious artifacts during the Spanish Civil War.
Tag: war
jenny holzer
The Sonnet-Ballad
Oh mother, mother, where is happiness?
They took my lover’s tallness off to war,
Left me lamenting. Now I cannot guess
What I can use an empty heart-cup for.
He won’t be coming back here any more.
Some day the war will end, but, oh, I knew
When he went walking grandly out that door
That my sweet love would have to be untrue.
Would have to be untrue. Would have to court
Coquettish death, whose impudent and strange
Possessive arms and beauty (of a sort)
Can make a hard man hesitate–and change.
And he will be the one to stammer, “Yes.”
Oh mother, mother, where is happiness?
– Gwendolyn Brook
Photograph of flesh burns from a survivor of the Hiroshima atomic bombing
from Hiroshima by John Hersey
The flash of the atomic blast in Hiroshima burned the pattern of this woman’s kimono into her skin.
Marguerite Duras, Hiroshima, Mon Amour
Rebecca Horn
Tower of the Nameless
1994
Ladders, violins, motors, electronic components
Private Collection, Vienna, Austria
“The breakup of Yugoslavia and the resulting Bosnian War led to the displacement of a massive quantity of people. Many refugees fled into Vienna, and soon the underground was filled with listless wanderers who did not speak German or have any semblance of a home to return to. With no identity, grasp of the language, or place to stay, music become the refugees’ only way to express their shared sorrow. Horn created this piece in hopes of offering stability to a nameless and lost people. The sculpture is composed of several ladders extending from the ground and up to a very high window, adorned with nine mechanical violins that play a single, mournful note on their own. It is as if they sing of some kind of bittersweet hope of what might lie at the top of the ladder and out into the sun. The melancholy humming of the violins has been known to inspire buskers to improvise along with them”
Little Bristling Soul 