"How to grieve a life?" ask the five faded photographs and a sculpture made of 13 black body bags, visible in the cold light of the exhibition space. The works gathered here by Lark Rings are to be understood as a commentary on our present time, where wars and their media representations are omnipresent. Through amateur videos, footage from body cams, photographs, and drone images, often in real-time, the violence of various conflicts can be followed in classical media and on the displays of our smartphones. While the evidential power of such images is frequently invoked to prove guilt or innocence, contextualizing information that could be verified by independent sources often remains absent. At the same time, the images seem to demand a specific stance from us as viewers towards what is depicted.
In "Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable" (2009) Judith Butler analyzed the extent to which engagement with the media representation is shaped by the ways in which narratives of war are constructed. These narratives aim to justify acts of violence and thereby hierarchize victims. Within this logic, certain victims are deemed necessary to protect lives that conform to a Western norm. This narrative abstraction profoundly affects when we feel horror, anger, guilt, loss, or indifference. War photographs and photographs of violent crimes are thus embedded in power dynamics that perpetuate colonial narratives and objectify the subjects of conflict.
For those privileged enough to be spatially distant from conflicts, the question of adopting a stance that moves beyond indifference becomes increasingly urgent. How can we acknowledge the humanity of the victims? How can we show solidarity with affected civilian populations? Lark Rings' works do not claim to provide a definitive answer; rather, the exhibition interrupts learned visual habits and associated modes of thought, thereby enabling an understanding of imagery shaped by power dynamics that are often intertwined with racist beliefs.
With the Ghost Series (2024), Rings continues to work with archival photographs of war crimes and massacres, striving for a dignified treatment of sensitive material. The once documentary-intended images of the victims of the man-made famine in Ukraine caused by the Soviet Union between 1931-33 (Holodomor); the U.S. atomic bombing over Japanese Hiroshima in 1945, which resulted in almost exclusively civilian casualties; the massacre by the Japanese Army in Nanjing of Chinese civilians in 1937; and the genocide committed by the Army of Republika Srpska, police, and Serbian paramilitaries against Bosniaks in 1995, are not reproduced one-to-one. Ring subjects the prints to a physical subtraction process, giving the motifs a ghostly presence. This treatment does not seek to erase what happened and thereby forget, but rather to find a way to engage with the intensity of the material. The affected individualsare not exposed to voyeuristic curiosity that reduces them to mere victims. The withdrawal of graphic details enables an engagement with the image material that extends beyond the shock moment, facilitating an exploration of how past massacres and their photographic documentation shape what we can see, know, and think in the present, as well as how these images have been and continue to be used to serve political and ideological interests. The Ghost Series builds upon the work Fear and Favor (2023), which is based on a photograph that was taken during the Japanese Bombing of Chongqing in China between 1938 and 1943.
While viewing images always allows for a certain distance, the sculpture Disavowed (2024) shifts focus to a physical experience. The spatial presence of the thirteen body bags reconnects the abundance of war images, as part of media reality, to a distressing physicality. Highlighting that while consumers of war images may maintain a geographical distance from the events, we can never be unaffected by crimes against humanity. The reference to the human body strikingly reminds us that we are part of a social fabric within which we bear responsibility for upholding humanity.
Text: Elsa Himmer