The aftermath of armed conflict and how it weaves into our lives is the theme of the newest exhibit at the East Hawaii Cultural Center. “Ghosts of War” presents the works of five female artists.
The opening is this Friday at 6 p.m., the exhibition can be seen until March 31st.
According to a press release from the EHCC, the exhibition will span a range of mediums and narratives, as each artist has a different story to tell.
In her film Letter to a Turtledove, Dana Kevelina combines amateur footage found on the internet, shot after the 2014 Russian invasion of Crimea, with archival footage from Donbass from the 1930s, when the region was a hotbed of Stalinist industrialization. Combining the disparate materials into a surreal anti-war poem, her poetic text references the distortion of history and the dehumanization of the country’s entire Ukrainian region.
Painter Reem Bassous, a survivor of the Lebanese Civil War (1975-1990) currently based in Hawaii, evokes memories of her youth and places her personal experiences in the context of historical turmoil and national development. The history of ancient and modern Beirut includes traumas of the place and the inhabitants of the artist’s hometown.
Polish artist Monika Niwelinska’s subtle work Gamma Trace was created in the New Mexico desert about 60 miles north of White Sand National Monument. On July 16, 1945, the first nuclear tests in history were carried out there under the code name Trinity Site. The artist investigates whether the land in this area is still radioactive by using light-sensitive copper plates and exposing them to gamma rays in the radioactive field.
Gongsan Kim, a Korean artist who has lived in the USA since 1997, pays tribute to the victims of the North Korean regime in her works. Her ritual performance involves the making of layered sculptures – altar-like images meant to heal the wounded spirits of the dictatorship’s murdered victims, who are thrown into collective pits without tombstones or names.
Svitlana Biedarieva’s The Morphology of War focuses on the idea that every society creates its own monsters. Biedarieva takes images from European illuminated manuscripts and bestiaries and reinterprets them digitally – implying that the absurdity of the story does not change over the centuries.
For more information, visit EHCC online at ehcc.org, call 961-5711, or visit EHCC at 141 Kalakaua Street. The opening hours of the gallery and office are Tuesday to Friday from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. and Saturday from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m