The WWI-centenary hoopla may be the pretext for this exhibition of contemporary artworks, but the Great War barely gets a look-in – which is slightly cheeky, yet also feels refreshingly unpious. Granted, the first piece you come across, Ken Currie’s vast painting, ‘Officers of the Great War’, addresses the period – though his parade of grotesquely maimed faces makes it clear that the show’s intention is far from cosy commemoration. And indeed, from that point on, the works mainly focus on other, more recent conflicts – from Nicola Hicks’s bronze of a Sarajevo siege victim, to the late photojournalist Tim Hetherington’s 2008 images of off-duty US soldiers in Afghanistan. One of the most chillingly timely pieces, a photographic diptych by Heidi Levine, depicts, in one picture, an armed Israeli soldier wearing a clown outfit for a birthday party and, adjacent, a Palestinian child wearing Hamas fancy-dress.
The basic theme, then, is the ruination, both physical and psychological, wrought by violence and warfare. Yet the exhibition’s format also occasionally presents a problem: by mixing together so many different conflicts from across the world, the specifics and nuances of each one sometimes get glossed over.
You can see this difficulty in works by Hanaa Malallah, whose burnt map of her native Iraq feels rather formulaic. Instead, in this context, it’s moments of pure, visceral horror which are far and away the most effective – the most potent and astonishing being Tim Shaw’s huge, nightmarish sculpture of a running man being hideously engulfed in flames.
Gabriel Coxhead