Documents from the Edges of Conflict

With almost terrible prescience, Documents from the Edges of Conflict, a show curated by Jean Wainwright and Steffi Klenz, will close its doors to a world very different to the one it opened to just three months earlier. While it is tempting to phrase this in terms of before and after the invasion of Ukraine, to do so would be, as demonstrated by many works within the show, far too simplistic. What much of the works on display in Documents from the Edges of Conflict do in fact is highlight that we are not on the edges of the start or end of conflict in a temporal sense, but that we are on the edges in terms of conscious perception; war, since at least the Bush administration, has been a continuous process of ‘indirect’ engagement, neatly contained to an arena just outside the peripheries of our daily lives. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine represents the rupturing of this boundary, bringing into horrifying visible reality the grim spectacle of war once again. What Wainwright and Klenz have done here in the James Hockey Gallery is curate a show that challenges the artifice of peace we surround ourselves with – for, to acknowledge the absurd and continuous presence of war all around us would be to destabilise the structure upon which we rationalise our day-to-day lives. Entering the space, one is first struck by the myriad of complex sightlines matched only by the tableaux of the show as a whole; from Santiago Sierra’s huge images peeping from behind the wall on which Catherine Yass’s glowing light box sits, to the concrete structure delivered by Klenz’s austere black and white works and the spatially luxurious David Birkin pieces, the show is a slick curation and it’s not afraid to show it. That’s not to shun it to the realms of an aesthetic-forward arrangement however, its aesthetic sensibilities acting as support for the conceptual intelligence of both its arrangement and design. Questions of photographic veracity and authenticity flood the opening space, which echoes with the sound of EDL and British nationalist protest mobs, courtesy of MacDonaldStrand’s three screen installation No More Flags, 2021 – a three piece video work which crudely removes flags from images of far-right protests in a bid to remove the rhetoric of patriotism and nationalism from the justification of mob violence, conditioning the space with the aggressive toxicity of its score from the moment one enters. The resonance between this ringing chorus of aggression and xenophobic hatred and Steffi Klenz’s Beun, is impossible