Artists: Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Beirut Urban Lab, Center for Spatial Technologies, Forensic Architecture, Kumjana Novakova, Matsuko Yokoji and Graham Harwood of the YoHa collective and in collaboration with Matthew Fuller

Curators of the art exhibition are Mathew Fuler and Tihomir Topuzovski.

War is omnipresent today. How do we understand it? War is increasingly taking place mediated through technologies that affect our senses as well as our actions. In addition to the destruction that war causes, it also acts through the realm of the senses and on the senses. Sensory technologies influence and mediate the ways in which we experience, know, interpret, classify, and exist in the world, as well as the traces of our actions.

“War of the Senses/War on the Senses” sees aesthetics as fundamental to the phenomenon of war. The senses are a key site through which war is transmitted, while also becoming its targets. Namely, by viewing conflicts as an enormous amount of data that circulates online at a considerable speed, they transform feelings and experiences; especially through what is understood as information warfare, a campaign of disinformation, as well as the automation of warfare itself today. The development of technology redistributes the depictions of crises and military conflicts, representing the site of war, as well as part of everyday news.
The exhibition focuses on the relationship between contemporary digital technologies and the production, distribution, interpretation and use of images as evidence of war in order to explore the connection between aesthetics and violence. The exhibition presents six projects that explore and analyze these conditions. Each individual work influences the ways of understanding certain cases, while also providing evidence that they represent a call for justice.

Biographies of the participant:

Lawrence Abu Hamdan is an independent researcher in the field of sound. His research focuses on sound and speech, using them as evidence in the UK Asylum and Immigration Tribunal. His work has also been represented by organisations such as Amnesty International and Defence for Children International. Abu Hamdan received his PhD in 2017 from Goldsmiths, University of London and was a joint winner of the 2019 Turner Prize.

Beirut Urban Lab is an interdisciplinary group based at the American University of Beirut. The group conducts research on urbanization with the aim of documenting and understanding the processes of transformation in Beirut, Lebanon, the wider region, and cities in general. Committed to visual approaches and methodologies, Beirut Urban Lab has created geographic databases, interactive platforms, and multiple mappings of urban systems over the past years, with the ultimate goal of imagining alternative models of spatial recovery and renewal.

The Center for Spacing Technologies is an interdisciplinary research collective from Kiev, specializing in spatial analysis, visualization, and modeling. Their practices include documenting and analyzing numerous cases of violence in Ukraine today.

The collective „Forensic Architecture" is a London-based research group founded in 2010. Using architectural models, artistic drawings and animations, they establish new forms of research related to human rights. Their work has been used as evidence in international courts, and has also been exhibited in the most renowned art institutions around the world.

Kumjana Novakova  is a film director and curator, she also teaches audiovisual methodologies. Novakova is one of the founders and chief curator of the "Human Rights Festival". Through her work, Kumjana explores themes related to power, war, memory and resistance. Novakova lives between Sarajevo and Skopje.  

„YoHa, (Matsuko Yokoji and Graham Harwood)is an art collective from England. They primarily work on the ways in which database technologies create different kinds of social conditions. For this project, as for some others, JoHa is collaborating with Matthew Fuller, co-curator of this exhibition. Matthew Fuller is Professor of Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths, University of London. As a cultural theorist, his research work is in the fields of art, science, politics and aesthetics.

Graphic Design - Denis Saraginovski
Exhibition Design - Jovan Ivanovski