PUTAIN DE GUERRE | 4.10 – 13.12.2014

The Charleroi Museum of Fine Arts is contributing to the commemorations of the 1914-18 War by presenting PUTAIN DE GUERRE, an exhibition which blends most of the contemporary visual practices to evoke war today and the human disasters which it spawns.

War was for a long time considered to be an art. Its values were lauded for a long time, its sacrifices exalted, its benefits hailed and its protagonists glorified. If we have a different view of it today, if it takes different forms today, it nevertheless delivers the same results, which have been unchanged since the dawn of time. At the start of the 21st century, just a hundred years after the ‘war to end all wars’, after countless commemorations, excuses and pardons, after so many times, still very recently, when we have said ‘never again’ in vain, war is more present than ever before at the heart of our lives. Virtually, as much as paradoxically, it has become our everyday background, a dreadfully banal commonplace, brought to us by omnipresent media. PUTAIN DE GUERRE, an exhibition designed by Jacques Cerami (Jacques Cerami Gallery – Couillet) in a space-time with a human dimension, attempts to return ‘physical form’ to those whose status – whether soldiers involved in the fighting, rebels or ordinary civilians – now makes them into ‘collateral damage’. Here, we see war personified and given a face: that of a terrorised young child, a maimed GI or a desperate mother. The full horror is concentrated into one specific moment, the instant when a war photographer reports on the chaos in real time. Right there in front of us are the accounts of those who survived, the veterans who make us think about the meaning to be attached to the fighting and to an ‘afterwards’ rendered (im)possible. Here too, a coffin with a raised fist, a patriotic skeleton, child bombers under a bell show the cynical and implacable absurdity of a merciless war. And here, finally, a dismembered body, soldiers on the ground, a fighting cavalryman, all remind us that behind every act of war, behind the numbers, the lists and the statistics, destinies are shattered. War comes at a price…