A letter of solidarity

To the creators, the witnesses and the keepers of the light,

I write to acknowledge the profound burden you carry in a moment when the world feels fractured by war. For those of you in the direct line of conflict, the act of creation is no longer just an aesthetic choice; it is an act of sheer defiance. For those watching from the periphery, the weight of indirect witness brings its own unique shadow - the struggle to find words or forms to represent the suffering. This "aesthetic resistance" against the erasure of culture and memory and your insistence on humanity in the face of destruction is remarkable.

Not long ago, for the Romans, art wasn't meant to express war; it was meant to glorify and justify it. Later, artists have historically processed the themes of conflict. Francisco Goya replaced the 'heroic' soldier with the faceless executioner (The Third of May 1808, 1814). Kathe Kollwitz captured the hollowed-out grief of women and children left in the wake of World War I (The Survivors, 1923). We look to Otto Dix, who painted high-ranking officials as bloated, decaying, robotic figures, often juxtaposed against the shattered bodies of veterans. He is among the artists who utilised the grotesque to expose the ugliness of power in the post-World War II era. We find strength in the heavy, leaden landscapes of Anselm Kiefer, who proved that the artist must sometimes dig through the physical ash of history to find the truth, be it the scorched earth, burnt wood or dried flowers onto the canvases.

Similar echoes resonate globally, transcending both borders and eras. Displaced Zinaida Serebriakova paints herself as a reminder of the struggle to maintain a sense of domestic peace and identity amidst crumbling social structures (At the Dressing Table, 1909). Zarina Hashmi consoles herself, bridging between the physical maps of war and the emotional maps of the heart (Cities Blotted into the Wilderness, 2003). For her, the prints (Home is a Foreign Place, 1999) were a way to "carve" her displacement into history. I shall not forget Wafaa Bilal's harrowing critique, making strangers shoot 60,000 Iraqis, virtually (Domestic Tension, 2007), highlighting human insensitivity towards violence and pain. I feel the phantom buzz of Mona Hatoum's installation (Homebound, 1999), where domesticity is bound by wires that sizzle and surge. It captures a volatile world where the tools of comfort are weaponised, singing with the lethal tension of a life under watch.

I recognise the bravery in the way Rashid Rana revisits the ghosts of art history. By acknowledging the lineage of Malevich's Black Square (1915) and then shattering its silence with the Digital Rubble of 2025, he teaches us that art cannot hide in abstraction while the world is on fire. His work is a reminder that the 'zero point' of art has been replaced by a point of witness - where every pixel is a life and every flash is a truth that cannot be unseen. One can examine how certain masterpieces move beyond mere "depiction" and enter the realm of visceral resistance. These artworks do not just show war; they reject it through a visual language of disgust and moral outrage. The works prove that even when your studios are reduced to 'rubble and clay', as we see in the current Gaza Biennale projects, the creative spirit remains an uncompromised root that no fire can reach. They say that "no war can stop the dreams of dreamers and no mechanism of domination extinguish the light in the hearts and minds of creators."

Prayer: May the day come soon when your brushes, your lenses and your hands are starved of the imagery of war! I pray for a world where you are no longer required to be the cartographers of ruins or the chroniclers of grief. May you be blessed with the "silence of the factory" being replaced by the vibrant noise of a living culture and may your only task be to celebrate the light and the uncompromised roots of a world at peace! Until then, we witness your witness. In shared hope and unwavering solidarity,

Bano

April 2026