Post-Peace

From February 24, the Württembergischer Kunstverein will be showing the exhibition Post-Peace curated by the Amsterdam-based Russian curator Katia Krupennikova. The exhibition, which includes works from nearly twenty artists from different cultural areas, traces the present-day manifestations of and relationships between war and peace. How much war is embedded within our peace? This is the pivotal question. 

The idea, still dominant today, that war is a means of achieving peace harks back to the early Christian theologian Saint Augustine from Late Antiquity. Around 1,500 years later, Field Marshal Earl Wavell asserted just the opposite, that the Versailles treaties of 1919 represented “a peace to end peace.” In taking up Wavell’s assessment, the exhibition proposes that our present-day situation, in which the “peace” of global capitalism is dearly bought through constant violence and war, be expressed with the term “Post-Peace,” the time after peace.

Indeed, Post-Peace spans a historical arc from the Second World War to the present day. Against the background that history is known to be always written by the victors, the exhibition takes a critical look at our cultures of memory and encourages a redetermination of historical discourse: issues like colonialism and fascism in Europe, the Holocaust, or the so-called Middle East conflict. Explored by the artists are topics like the ramifications of 9/11, the cynicism of global arms trafficking, the contemporary forms of nationalism and militarism, and the conflicts involving Ukraine or the Kurdish population.