(COUNTER) NARRATIVES. Mounira Al Solh, Yael Bartana, Walid Raad

Room 22-24

How can artists use art to make sense of wartime events? How can they depict the after-effects of war? What tools do artists have to counteract a sense of powerlessness or speechlessness?
Together with the Written Art Collection, the Collection of Photography and Time-Based Media puts the spotlight on artists from the Middle East confronted with the reality of war. In the single-shot video in her studio, Mounira Al Solh demonstrably refuses to talk about the war but fails. Meanwhile, Yael Bartana has a 1930s-style kibbutz built on a scale of 1:1 in the Muranów district of Warsaw. In that piece, Bartana adopts the cinematic language of socialist documentaries to evoke the Zionist dream, by having strong and beautiful women and men continue building houses and fulfilling their communal obligations against all odds. Walid Raad, in turn, shares excerpts from the diary his father kept during the Lebanese Civil War, containing information, for example, on price hikes for construction materials, as well as on what the bombs looked like that landed around his house.
The artists examine how war affects the human body and mind. In the diversity of their approaches, they provide individual answers to collective questions.

With support from the Written Art Collection.

Further information on the exhibition on the website of the Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen.