People who live in the war zones and those who live outside them see and experience war differently. Though destruction, deaths and excruciating pains trigger human imagination, for those who undergo the calamities of wars may not immediately translate the ferociousness of wars in real time, except for the war photographers deputed in the fronts or volunteer to do the documentation. People who are away from the war zones ‘imagine a war and its aftermaths’ and give expression to the human conditions there.

Therefore today, the ‘art on war’ should be understood as art of the mediatized experiences of war. Though there are ‘live transmissions’ from the warfronts thanks to technology, for the world outside the zone, the effect and experience of it is a ‘delayed’ one. The temporal rupture that happens during or through mediatization of war events and images, gives the rest of the world sufficient time to see and experience it as a ‘virtual’ one. Baudrillard calls it ‘simulacrum’; a replacement of sorts and as he claimed during the Gulf War, it could be the virtual creation of a war that had never occurred.

Kerala is a southern state in India where war is a mediatized reality. However, perhaps more than any artists from other parts of India, the artists from Kerala express their ideas and views on wars happening elsewhere. Thanks to socio-cultural and political evolutions peculiar to this place, artists are highly sensitive and responsive to the happenings around the world. Even a cursory look at the works displayed in this exhibition reveals that most of the works are empathetic in nature even when they are hugely symbolic and less in narration.

There are two kinds of works in this exhibition; responsive in a symbolic way and explanatory in a narrative way. For the artists, war in itself is not strictly a physical happening using hardcore war weapons; for many of them it is a concept of conflict that operates in various layers of history and manifests in many social processes. As this is a larger backdrop for the artists in this exhibition, none of them seem to be looking at war as a combat zone or a zone of destructions and death, on the contrary they see war as an ‘idea’ that causes various levels of socio-cultural reactions and changes.

Jaysree P G’s work are red landscapes, a symbol of a landscape after or during the battle. There are no signs of death or destruction. But the fiery red could make one feel the severity of a war. Here, for Jaysree, war is an intense feeling which cannot be translated into physical forms. Interestingly, transforming the intensity of a war into a series of totemic symbols is E H Pushkin’s forte. While T V Santhosh gives a narrative edge to the idea of war through a domestic scene of homely happiness suddenly interrupted by a scene of bombing seen in the television.

I do not want to explain the contribution of every artist. However, the common trend is a representational symbolism and semi-narrative as seen in the works of Sreeja Pallom, Madhu Venugopalan, Shijo Jacob and Johns Mathew. Some are emblematic narratives and some are not, but the artistic intention is to tell a story. P S Jalaja’s representation of war is from a different level of understanding about war, as I mentioned in the beginning, the ideological war within the history of Kerala.

This exhibition is a humble symbolic effort to stand up against the atrocities of war and a demand for the prevalence of peace. Though the world order does not go by the aestheticized demands of people, as Milton said, they also serve who stand and stare. This exhibition is a stare at the face of the war mongers. They may stare back at the artists and make them flinch, however, there could be a sense of satisfaction in serving a universal cause in a different way.