MAGDALENA
ABAKANOWICZ
In 1992, Magdalena Abakanowicz began the series Hand-like Trees (1992–2004) as a sculptural response to her unrealized Arboreal Architecture. A public petition requested Abaka-nowicz to be commissioned to produce a permanent work in Hiroshima, Japan, as a memorial to the victims of nuclear destruction. She proposed a hand-like tower, poised as if to catch the bomb in the exact place where it exploded, 640 meters above sea level. This project was never carried out due to worries it might offend the sensibilities of hibakushas — surviving victims of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. There was worry that it might be perceived as too aggressive. In response, Abakanowicz created Space of Becalmed Beings (1993), a monument of 40 silent, seated bronze backs. They form a permanent installation on the terrace of the Contemporary Art Museum of the City of Hiroshima.
Magdalena Abakanowicz (1930-2017) was a Polish sculptor and creator of fiber art. She often worked around sculpture, installation and textile. A sense of fluidity and possibility manifests itself in Abakanowicz's works as they shift from rigid and rectangular to more organic shapes. Curved sculptures sliced open like carcasses accompany objects that remind us of the artist’s lifelong obsession with the natural world.
THOMAS
HIRSCHHORN
In the hypercomplex world of today, with its unresolved history, we must remember and insist on the simplest, most primitive, most human law: ‘You should not kill!’
Thomas Hirschhorn (Switzerland, 1957) has created more than seventy works in public spaces, questioning the autonomy, authorship, and resistance of a work of art, and asserting the power of art to touch and transform the other. “I want to use art as a tool to establish a contact with the Other — this is a necessity — and I am convinced that the only possible contact with the Other happens ‘One to One’, as equals,” he wrote. Through his experience of working in public space, Hirschhorn has developed his own guidelines of ‘Presence and Production’ by being present and producing on location during the full course of his projects. “To be ‘present’ and to ‘produce’ means to make a physical statement, here and now. I believe that only through presence — my presence — and only through production — my production — can my work have an impact in public space or at a public location.” Hirschhorn has dedicated works to philosophers, writers, and artists he loves, in the form of large-scale sculpture works such as altars, kiosks, monuments, maps, and collages.
Portait: Tobias Valentin
MONICA
BONVICINI
My Body Became Opressed into a Column may refer to what is known as the ‘atomic shadow,’ a phenomenon pro-duced by the light and heat emitted at the moment of the explosion of an atomic bomb. Where there was a body or an object, today a mark remains. These projections can be found on the floors, walls and other surfaces near the hypocenter of the explosion in Hiroshima.
Monica Bonvicini (Italy, 1965) emerged as a visual artist and started exhibiting internationally in the mid-1990s. Her multifaceted practice investigates the relationship between architecture, power struc-tures, gender and space. Her research translates into works that question the meaning of making art, the ambiguity of language, and the limits and possibilities connected to the ideal of freedom. Dry-humored, direct and imbued with historical, political and social refe-rences, Bonvicini's art never refrains from establishing a critical connection with the sites where it is exhibited, its materials, and the roles of spectator and creator. Since her first solo exhibition at the California Institute of the Arts in 1991, her approach has formally evolved over the years without betraying its analytical force and inclination to challenge the viewer’s perspective while taking hefty sideswipes at patriarchal socio-cultural conventions
KARL
HOLMQVIST
Stop the Spiral is made in Holmqvist’s characteristic way of engaging with visual poetry, in which a spiral is formed by the phrase: Fear War Arms Harm.
Karl Holmqvist is an artist whose primary material is language. His inventive re-renderings of words and phrases take various forms, including artist’s books, posters, wall drawings, sculpture, videos, and live performances. Borrowing from generic types of speech or written word, ranging from common sayings to literary references, from popular music to political activism, Holmqvist repositions these sampled fragments in new contexts, allowing for ambiguity and double meanings to emerge
CAMPAIGN FOR
NUCLEAR
DISARMAMENT
By the year 1958, a considerable number of people had become concerned about anti-nuclear issues, both in Britain and around the world. Founded by a committee that included Canon John Collins as chairman, Bertrand Russell as president and Peggy Duff as organizing secretary, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) was the first organized movement – and Europe’s largest peace organization – to ban the bomb.
The CND called for Britain to unilaterally renounce nuclear weapons, appealing to the morality of both politicians and the public. The group organized letterwriting campaigns, lobbied MPs, and campaigned for candidates advocating for anti-nuclear policies.
Between 1958 and
1965 it organized the key Aldermaston March, held over Easter weekend, departing from the Atomic Weapons Establishment near Aldermaston and walking to Trafalgar Square, London. In the 1980s, public concern about the threat of nuclear weapons increased, and the movement underwent a major resurgence driven by rising concern about the Cold War.
TOMÁS
SARACENO
Some scientists maintain that the Capitalocene, the current era marked by the disproportionally-distributed impact of humanity’s accumulation of capital on biodiversity and climate, may have begun on July 16, 1945, at White Sands (USA), when the detonation of the first atomic bomb released radioactive particles into the atmosphere all over the planet. Seventy years later, in the exact same location, the Aerocene community – which seeks to create an environment free from borders, free from fossil fuels – released something of its own into the atmosphere: using only the power of the sun to heat the air inside an envelope, seven people were lifted into the air for approximately 2 hours and 15 minutes, spreading a message of hope for alternative energies.
Tomás Saraceno (Argentina, 1973) is an artist whose projects dialogue with forms of life and life-forming, rethinking dominant threads of knowledge and recognizing how diverse modes of being engage a multiplicity of vibrations on the Web of Life. For more than two decades, Saraceno has worked with local communities, scientific researchers and institutions around the world, and has activated open-source, interdisciplinary, collective projects, including Museo Aero Solar (2007–), the Aerocene Foundation (2015–), and Arachnophilia, working towards a society free from carbon emissions, for intra and interspecies climate justice.
EBECHO
MUSLIMOVA
Ebecho Muslimova (Russia, 1984) draws inspiration for her poster from John Donne’s poem No Man Is an Island, also known as For Whom the Bell Tolls. The text expresses the shared vulnerability that interconnects all life, a fundamental concept to grasp in order to imagine a world without weapons of mass destruction.
Muslimova has focused her practice on the representation of her alter ego, Fatebe—a resilient, shameless cartoon figure who embodies the absurdity life often takes on. Her body resonates with the scenarios she inhabits, showing the tensions between discomfortand bodily freedom.
GUERRILLA GIRLS
The text in the poster says it all. Give women all over the world more political power and let’s see what they can do with it. It can’t get any worse.
The Guerrilla Girls are anonymous artist activists who use disruptive headlines, visuals and statistics to expose gender and ethnic bias and corruption in art, film, politics and pop culture. They create political art that uses the persuasive strategies of advertising and has the power to change minds. The Guerrilla Girls believe in an intersectional feminism that fights for human rights for all people and all genders. They have done hundreds of projects all over the world, including exhibitions and interventions inside museums, blasting them on their own walls for their discriminatory practices. Their motto: “Do one thing. If it works, do another. If it doesn't, keep chipping away.” Creative complaining works!
JOSÉ
DÁVILA
Jose Dávila has been working on his Cut-out works for several years now and has a wide variety of research lines through this technique, approaching the work of specific artists throughout art history. The progressive dissection of elements from the photographic documentation of these works transforms these images into autonomous three-dimensional presences. The background or the primary subject become absent figures, creating compositions that exist only through negation, thus alluding to a figurative cancellation of the atomic bomb by eliminating the mushroom cloud.
Dávila (Mexico, 1974) has also created thematic compendiums dissecting the visual languages that function within architecture, art history and the existing photographic documentation of artists and their studios. These apophatic gestures contribute to the possibilities of the homage and the reinterpretation of art history. Searching for the poetic nature inherent to these structural intuitions, Dávila produces artworks in which tension and stillness, geometric order and random chaos, fragility and resistance are rendered through a wide range of materials and media.
MÓNICA DE LA TORRE
& ALEX BALGIU
Mónica De La Torre is a poet born and raised in Mexico City whose writing engages with translation, performance, and the visual arts. She has published several books, acted as editor to BOMB Magazine, and Señal, Ugly Duckling Presse’s chapbook series of Latin American poetry in translation, and, with Alex Balgiu, co-edited the anthology Women in Concrete Poetry 1959–79.
/
Alex Balgiu is an educator, designer, writer and book gatherer. He is concerned with designing spaces for collective creativity and experimenting with various modes of transmission.
The artists designed the poster displaying and gradually deleting the letters in the name of the nine global nuclear powers — the US, Russia, China, France, the UK, Israel, North Korea, India and Pakistan — in the hope that someday near, these nations will join together and sign the Nuclear Weapon Ban Treaty. The alternative means ultimate destruction.
ISAMU
NOGUCHI
Seeing the opportunity to use his extraordinary position as a human bridge between Japan and the United States, Isamu Noguchi — after completing his design for the bridges to Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park — was invited in 1951 to design the park’s centerpiece, a cenotaph to the dead. Unfortunately, the political will and funds never materialized and the project was never carried out. Isamu Noguchi (1904–1988) was one of the 20th century's most significant sculptors, yet his resolute redefinition of the art form led to a practice spanning gardens, playgrounds, public projects, furniture, lighting, and set design. He believed strongly in the social role of art and dedicated much of his life to creating public works such as parks, plazas, and fountains. Born in Los Angeles to a white American mother and a Japanese father, Noguchi felt a lifelong sense of never really belonging anywhere, and channeled this into his artistic vision and philosophy, aspiring to be a citizen of the world. Noguchi’s first retrospective in the United States was in 1968 at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. In 1985, Noguchi opened the Isamu Noguchi Garden Museum, now known as The Noguchi Museum, in Long Island City, New York. In 1986, he represented the United States at the Venice Biennale. In accordance with his wishes, his studio in Mure, Japan, became the Isamu Noguchi Garden Museum Japan in 1999. Noguchi received the Edward MacDowell Medal for Outstanding Lifetime Contribution to the Arts in 1982; the Kyoto Prize in Arts in 1986; the National Medal of Arts in 1987; and the Order of the Sacred Treasure from the Japanese government in 1988.Portait: [at "Isamu Noguchi," Mitsukoshi Department Store (Nihombashi Head Store), Tokyo, Japan], 1950.The Noguchi Museum Archives, 04337.
Photo: Jun Miki. ©The Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum, New York / ARS
fierce pussy
A Bomb Knows No Borders’ top letter edges merge into the dividing line that separates the abyss of a black and a white rectangle, an analogy for the merciless force of destruction of a nuclear weapon, with no limitations.Formed in New York City in 1991, through their immersion in AIDS activism during a decade of increasing political mobilization around LGBTQ+ rights, fierce pussy brought lesbian identity and visibility directly into the streets. Low-tech and low-budget, the collective responded to the urgency of those years, using readily available resources: old typewriters, found photographs, their own baby pictures and the printing supplies and equipment accessible in their day jobs. Four of the original core members — Nancy Brooks Brody, Joy Episalla, Zoe Leonard, and Carrie Yamaoka — continue to work together today.
Image credit: Alice O'Malley
FRIEDA
TORANZO
JAEGER
Today, we coexist in a world where 50 megaton nuclear weapons are stockpiled by different states. The obliteration power of this kind of bomb is more than 3000 times greater than the one the US dropped on Hiroshima in 1945. Shortly, a Global Suicide; downfall, and widespread radiation exposure would take us all to the same destiny. Frieda Toranzo Jaeger (1988, Mexico City, Mexico) pictorial pieces explore the political limitations of art and the negation of painting as a medium, advocating for a new form of political knowledge within the painted object. While envisioning communion, queer enjoyment, and utopian fantasies, Frieda incorporates Mexican pre-Columbian embroidery into the genealogy of painting. Her practice depicts revisited history and its repurpose. Her influences bounce between iconographically rich 14th and 15th century European paintings, and contemporary examinations of the visual culture of late capitalism.
SUPERFLEX
Nine Attacks on the Ocean is a black and white poster featuring the name of all nine known underwater nuclear weapon tests. These tests were conducted by the USA, the Soviet Union, and the United Kingdom between 1946 and 1962, before underwater nuclear testing was banned by the Partial Test Ban Treaty in 1963.
SUPERFLEX was founded in 1993 by Jakob Fenger, Bjørnstjerne Christiansen, and Rasmus Rosengren Nielsen. Conceived as an expanded collective, SUPERFLEX has consistently worked with a wide variety of collaborators, from gardeners to engineers to audience members. Engaging with alternative models for the creation of social and economic organization, works have taken the form of energy systems, beverages, sculptures, copies, hypnosis sessions, infrastructure, paintings, plant nurseries, contracts, and public spaces.
Working in and outside the physical location of the exhibition space, SUPERFLEX has been engaged in major public space projects since their award-winning Superkilen opened in 2011. These projects often involve participation, involving the input of local communities, specialists, and children. Taking the idea of collaboration even further, recent works have involved soliciting the participation of other species. SUPERFLEX has been developing a new kind of urbanism that includes the perspectives of plants and animals, aiming to move society towards interspecies living. For SUPERFLEX, the best idea might come from a fish.
PETER
KENNARD
Broken Missile (1980) depicts a nuclear warhead cracked in half by the CND symbol. Kennard said he bought a toy missile at a toy shop in London, smashed it in two with a hammer, and took a photograph. The image later became the logo for the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN).
Peter Kennard’s (UK, 1949) work has been at the cutting edge of political art since his work protesting the Vietnam War in 1968. His photomontages, installations, and paintings became globally known after gaining exposure in galleries, on the streets, in newspapers, magazines, posters, and books. He is a Professor of Political Art at the Royal College of Art, London.
THEO
DEUTINGER
This image represents all currently existing 12,765 nuclear warheads. Each warhead is numbered and labeled with the country to which it ‘belongs,’ starting with Russia, the country with the largest arsenal. The position of the pac-man is arbitrarily chosen, and it suggests a future in which a special force, i.e., pac-man, eliminates and defuses the bombs one by one.
Theo Deutinger (Austria, 1971) is an architect, writer and designer. He is the founder and head of The Department (TD), a practice that combines architecture with research, visualization and artistic thinking. At TD, Deutinger works at all scales, from global planning, spatial master plans, architecture to graphic and curatorial work. Deutinger is known for his theoretical writings on the transformation of European urban culture, and his socio-cultural studies such as the Handbook of Tyranny.
MATT
MULLICAN
By displaying and alternating the order of these words, Matt Mullican intends to make sense of the world and how we perceive it. Portrayed in a font he created, the words’ simplified visual language intends for it to be captured in a matter of seconds. Mullican’s extensive language of signs and symbols describe systems of knowledge, equally attuned to his subconscious mind and his experience of reality.
Matt Mullican (USA, 1951) has been interested in studying and depicting the models of representation and organization of the world. He has developed a complex language consisting of symbols based on both international signage and invented signs with an associated color system. These systems allow him to examine the relationship between reality and perception, to model the real and consider all stages of the human condition. In addition to his experimentation with language, Mullican depicts his experience with the everyday, exploring specific moments in time, and embodying quotidian ideas through his alter ego ‘That Person.’ He explores how meaning is created and communicated in real life as opposed to through media. Mullican lives and works in Berlin and New York.
MARIANA
YAMPOLSKY
This poster carefully addresses existing military artillery, weapons or lethal devices currently produced and distributed throughout the world, requesting immediate nuclear and general global disarmament.
Santiago Sierra (Spain, 1966) is a contemporary artist known for using installation, performance and photography as an artistic medium. His work is characterized by situations where survival is a fundamental element. Sierra translates this into an artistic practice that investigates inhuman aspects of the economic system, the mechanisms of corruption and the labor exploitation of the individual. He links diverse references with reality in an exploration of a world articulated by critical discourse in the art world and its agents.
In the 1990s, his projects were known for establishing systems of negotiation with third parties to carry out actions that generally occupy a public space to demonstrate against the materialistic procedures related to the systemic violence of capitalism and the working conditions it generates. This body of work has questioned the function of institutional structures, control over the public space, the emergence of informal architectures in the urban landscape associated with forms of survival, and the conditions of disuse and disposal not only from the point of view of the material but also as a reflection of social contrasts.
SANTIAGO
SIERRA
This poster carefully addresses existing military artillery, weapons or lethal devices currently produced and distributed throughout the world, requesting immediate nuclear and general global disarmament.
Santiago Sierra (Spain, 1966) is a contemporary artist known for using installation, performance and photography as an artistic medium. His work is characterized by situations where survival is a fundamental element. Sierra translates this into an artistic practice that investigates inhuman aspects of the economic system, the mechanisms of corruption and the labor exploitation of the individual. He links diverse references with reality in an exploration of a world articulated by critical discourse in the art world and its agents.
In the 1990s, his projects were known for establishing systems of negotiation with third parties to carry out actions that generally occupy a public space to demonstrate against the materialistic procedures related to the systemic violence of capitalism and the working conditions it generates. This body of work has questioned the function of institutional structures, control over the public space, the emergence of informal architectures in the urban landscape associated with forms of survival, and the conditions of disuse and disposal not only from the point of view of the material but also as a reflection of social contrasts.
SEAN
DOWER
In this poster, Sean Dower revisits the character of Zou Zou the cabaret clown and connects the philosophy and politics of the era of the original nuclear arms race to the present day. Dower discovered Zou Zou in 1993 when he found a videotape of a 1980’s performance by the clown on an Amsterdam Market. The performance made references to particular socio - political issues of the era , including the nuclear arms race and space travel. The central image on the poster features a 1993 photo of Dower impers onating Zou Zou, using props and make - up. The text is drawn from the lyrics of the gospel hymn, When the Saints Go Marching In , whose tune is played by Zou Zou on a prop during his performance. The lyrics of this early 1900s gospel hymn are inspired by the Book of Revelation, which warns of the final judgment or ‘end of days’ associated with the apocalypse. The text style references the democratic use of stencil s in political activism and counter culture.
Sean Dower (born 1965) began making live performances in the early 1980s as part of the UK ‘industrial’ music scene. He went on to study sculpture, film and photography and continues to incorporate sound and pe rformance into his practice . Dower has exhibited his work internationally since the early 1990s.
ABEL
QUEZADA
Abel Quezada (1920-1991) was a writer, cartoonist, illustrator and painter. His illustrated texts accompanied the political and social life of Mexico from the 50s, combining critique, humor and irony. His capacity to decipher the spirit of the Mexican individual, portray it with humor and at the same time make a biting criticism of society and its politicians, made Quezada one of the leading political cartoonists in the country. Throughout the 40s he lived in New York City and because of his work, his close relationship with the city continued into the 1980s. During the 60s he began painting as the last of his artistic facets. In his pictorial work his interest in reflecting Mexican reality and society is seen in his landscapes with political and social overtones, portraits of different historical and family figures, as well as scenes from the daily life of the cities he visited, such as London and New York, among other subjects.
Quezada contributed cartoons to publications including Ovaciones, Excélsior (1956-1976) and Novedades (1976-1989). In the United States, he drew cover images for The New Yorker and The New York Times Magazine.
ART &
LANGUAGE
This quote is taken from an interview with Bertrand Russell (1872-1970), a British mathematician, philosopher, logician and founding member and, the only president of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, established in 1958 at the height of the Cold War.
The activities of Art & Language have been marked from the outset by practical variety, by resistance to easy categorization and by a tendency to provoke open and reflexive enquiry. Art & Language’s earliest works date from before 1968, when the name was first adopted to refer to an artistic practice. In the following year, the first issue of the journal Art-Language was published in England. Over the next few years, Art & Language provided a common identity for a number of people already involved in various types of collaboration. The mid 1960s had seen widespread collapse in the authority of those individualistic cultural protocols which go under the name of Modernism, and the coming together of the two terms ‘Art’ and ‘Language’ served to recognize a range of intellectual concerns and artistic expedients that collapse had occasioned. For a variety of activities which bore practically and critically upon the concept of art, but which were at home neither in the studio nor in the gallery, Art & Language promised a social base in shared conversation. That conversation in turn transformed the practice of those involved and generated other kinds of work.
ANTONI MIRALDA
JUAN
O`GORMAN
The image included is a detail of the painting Nuestra maravillosa civilización (Our Marvelous Civilization) (1979), in which the artist portrays an intense and highly detailed recollection of scenes that depict the then-current world. For the poster, a selection of the scenery shows a mushroom cloud that rises above a devastated city. Within it, there are a number of references to capitalism and the power systems of the 20th century. In his own struggle as a committed social activist, O’Gorman created a powerful declaration of opposition to the past, present, and future world.Juan O’Gorman (1905-1982) was a Mexican painter, muralist, and architect, considered the first functionalist in Latin America. The integration that exists between his multidisciplinary production makes him stand out as one of the most prominent and wide-reaching figures in the construction of the artistic identity of Mexico in the last century. Among his most outstanding architectural works are The First Functionalist House (1929), intended as a home for his parents; the Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo (1931- 1932) house-studio; and the Instituto Politécnico Nacional (1932). O’Gorman carried out more than thirty primary and technical schools for the Secretaría de Educación Pública (1932-1934); directed the construction of the building and the mural of the Central Library of the UNAM (1949- 1951); and designed and built his home-studio in the San Jerónimo area of Mexico City (1956) as well as the Museo Anahuacalli (1963), Diego Rivera’s attempt to preserve one of the largest pre-Columbian art collections in Mexico.
As a painter and muralist, numerous portraits of colleagues and figures from the artistic scene of that period stand out, as well as Historia de la Aviación (History of Aviation) (1937), which is located in the International Airport of Mexico City, and Alegoría de las comunicaciones (Allegory of Communications) (1953), in the headquarters of the Secretaría de Comunicaciones y Transporte.
TIM
BISKUP
In his contribution, Tim Biskup switches from his trademark, color illustrations to black and white, using a graphite rod to create this depiction of a sad mushroom cloud with the words ‘I’m not okay.’ scrawled across it, serving as a representation of humanity.
Tim Biskup (USA, 1967) is a Southern California artist whose practice is focused mainly on abstract and figurative painting, but extends into sculpture, printmaking and music. He studied fine art at Otis/Parsons before entering the animation and illustration industries to hone his technical skills. In 1999, Biskup gathered a community of artists and began hosting live art auctions at bars around Los Angeles. He quickly found an audience for his personal work and began a career showing his art in gallery settings. His complex color and design theories pushed forward an aesthetic which has continued to develop and morph over the years. In February of 2017, Biskup opened a small gallery space called Face Guts in Glassell Park, CA.
ADAM JONAS
HOROWITZ
Adam Jonas Horowitz is a sculptor, performer, public installation artist, and filmmaker of fiction and documentary films, unified by their effort to confront and contemplate spicy dilemmas of human rights and the environment in fresh, challenging ways. A graduate of the UC Berkeley School of Journalism, he produced the PBS funded, internationally acclaimed feature documentary film Nuclear Savage: The Islands of Secret Project 4.1. He also created a satiric, megalithic “anti-monument” to consumer society: the monumental public art installation Fridgehenge; a full-scale pagan temple of kitchen appliances built by loin-clothed Sisyphean slaves on the site of a former solid waste landfill in Santa Fe, New Mexico. He is currently producing a documentary film about the U.S. orchestrated cover-up of WWII Japanese war crimes featuring several former "Comfort Women" survivors. In the public art realm, he is in the process of creating PlasticHenge, a monumental public art installation and sculptural sequel to Fridgehenge. Also in production is his new satiric, fictional film series about advanced technology and human hubris Atomic Gods: Creation Myths of the Bomb, that has been partially funded by 516 Arts and the Andy Warhol Foundation.
JORGE
MÉNDEZ BLAKE
IÑIGO
MANGLANO-OVALLE
Dirty Bomb (2008) is a fullscale replica sculpture of Fat Man, the name of the atomic bomb that was detonated over Nagasaki, Japan, by the United States on August 9, 1945. The term ‘dirty bomb’ is one of the many linguistic terms devised for use in our war of metaphors. It is referred to as a weapon of mass disruption whose objective is to release contamination and cause panic and subsequent economic damage. The sculpture as a speculative weapon conflates historical fact with a fabricated state of terror by presenting a supposedly virtuous object as both clean and dirty. Its title addresses the manipulation of language by power, which in order to purify its own contaminated historical legacy must contaminate that which it claims to be its opposite. Hence the atomic bomb is presented as a hygienic device while its opposite, the terrorist weapon, must by necessity be tainted and unsanitary – dirty. The sculpture conflates these opposing notions and points to the real dirty bomb: the metaphor.
Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle (Spain, 1961) is a conceptual and visual artist working across media to create largescale installations and architectural interventions.
BENJAMIN
LEE
IBenjamin Lee, is an award winning design director, based in London. His academic journey culminated
in a distinguished graduation from Central St Martins in 2009. Possessing over a decade of expertise
in the graphic design, Benjamin has collaborated with non-governmental organizations, provided
strategic guidance to emerging startups, and sculpted visual identities for some of the world's most
revered institutions. Beyond his commercial endeavors, Benjamin's work is crafted to challenge conventional thought and the entrenched systems of society, traversing the realms of anti-war advocacy, human and data rights, as well as environmental conservation.
LUKAS
PANEK
A painterly yet digital image of the infamous photograph Atomic Cloud Rises Over Nagasaki, Japan, 1945, shows a blurred 45,000-foot-tall mushroom cloud rising over Nagasaki, a few minutes after the nuclear bomb was detonated in August 9, 1945. By diming the original image, the artist attempts to tarnish the presence of the atomic explosion — in hopes of its complete erasure —, while also preserving the remnant, an important aspect for the construction of the collective memory of a disaster.
Lukas Panek creates paintings and videos that explore the circulation and modification of images nowadays. Starting from various points of entry, he repeatedly directs his attention to the subtleties and economies of contemporary image production. Examining hierarchies within image-driven cultures, Panek dissects not only those between single images and their contents themselves, but further addresses the critical relationship between their use and reproduction. He identifies them as depreciated compan-ions of everyday life, seeking to empower their social dimension in realms that reach much further beyond the private and personal.
JULIA
PATEY
PEACE
PILGRIM
A painterly yet digital image of the infamous photograph Atomic Cloud Rises Over Nagasaki, Japan, 1945, shows a blurred 45,000-foot-tall mushroom cloud rising over Nagasaki, a few minutes after the nuclear bomb was detonated in August 9, 1945. By diming the original image, the artist attempts to tarnish the presence of the atomic explosion — in hopes of its complete erasure —, while also preserving the remnant, an important aspect for the construction of the collective memory of a disaster.
Lukas Panek creates paintings and videos that explore the circulation and modification of images nowadays. Starting from various points of entry, he repeatedly directs his attention to the subtleties and economies of contemporary image production. Examining hierarchies within image-driven cultures, Panek dissects not only those between single images and their contents themselves, but further addresses the critical relationship between their use and reproduction. He identifies them as depreciated compan-ions of everyday life, seeking to empower their social dimension in realms that reach much further beyond the private and personal.
In her work, Renata Petersen (Mexico, 1993) addresses themes of religious and social character, which are not exempt from black humor. In the form of vignettes, with a close relationship to comics and cartoons, she produces satirical revisions of subjects with powerful repercussions in popular culture such as sects, urban legends, gender roles, contemporary sexuality and the subjectivity implicit in ‘bad taste.’ She has a particular interest in interweaving referential winks to works by artists such as Mike Kelley, Sarah Lucas, Raymond Pettibon, Kim Gordon, or Jim Morrison — here referring to The Doors’ 1967 hit song The End — with her own obsession with pornography, eschatology and hyperconsumerist junk TV, through a production linked to traditional Guadalajara’s artisan techniques, such as ceramics and blown glass.
PROYECTO
TELEVÉTICA
PEDRO
Pax Atomica is a full-scale rendering of the Hiroshima bomb also known as Little Boy, transformed into a bird cage where a dove, symbolizing peace, is trapped. The title may conjure terms such as Pax Romana, Pax Britannica or Pax Americana, all used to describe long periods of apparent peace that, if reviewed closely, were only possible under ruthless imperialist domination. With this work Reyes hopes to challenge the common assumption that ‘there have not been world wars since nuclear bombs were first used.’ To the contrary: there have been and continue to be countless wars, precisely because of the arrogance that characterizes nuclear armed states.
Pedro Reyes’ work follows a double path, addressing art as both aesthetic research and social practice. The first is developed through sculpture, the second through conceptual and participatory strategies. In 2008, Reyes initiated the ongoing Palas por pistolas project, in which 1,527 guns were melted unto shovels to plant 1,527 trees. This led to Disarm (2012) and the transformation of 6,700 destroyed guns into musical instruments. Reyes has held visiting faculty positions at Bard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In 2022, Reyes held three survey shows: Escultura social at the MARCO Museum in Monterrey, Sociatry at the Marta Herford Museum in Germany and Direct Action at SITE Santa Fe, New Mexico.
LAURE
PROUVOST
Whether instructional, sensual, or referring directly to surrounding architecture, Laure Prouvost’s signs engage with the context in which they are installed, encouraging the viewer’s interaction with and rereading of this environment. The language employed allows space for multiple interpretations, with images manifesting in the viewer's imagination.
In this sense, the works from this ‘Signs’ series operate to explore notions of human perception and systems of representation through established truths and subjective fictions.
Laure Prouvost (France, 1867) received her BFA from Central St Martins, London, and studied towards her MFA at Goldsmiths College, London. She also took part in the LUX Associate Programme.
FANNY
RABEL
México está en peligro (Mexico is in Danger) is a 1958 edition of Taller de Gráfica Popular that features a series of engravings from other notable artists such as Mariana Yampolsky, Leopoldo Méndez and Ángel Bracho, which warn about the dangers and consequences of the use of nuclear weapons and ask for immediate nuclear disarmament. The image depicts a woman in distress facing a nuclear explosion, and is accompanied by a description that translates to: “The nuclear tests in Nevada, USA, produce clouds loaded with radioactivity that are carried by the winds.”
Fanny Rabinovich Compañez (1922-2008) was a painter and engraver, originally from Lodz, Poland. She arrived in Mexico in 1938 and enrolled in the Escuela Nocturna para Trabajadores, where she took drawing and engraving courses. In 1942, she joined the Escuela Nacional de Pintura, Escultura y Grabado "La Esmeralda" under the mentorship of Frida Kahlo. Rabel was introduced to art by muralists, becoming a scaffolding artist in her own right. It was through contact with those revolutionary and communist painters that she discovered the possibilities of socially engaged art.
SÁNCHEZ RULL
The work of José Luis Sánchez Rull (México, 1964) takes its images form a vast anthology of references that come form a multiplicity of visualities, from the history of art, comics or graphic novels, to literature, cinema, and music. These drawings and paintings are an exploration of the artist´s psyche, fed by his interest in combining both counterculture and hegemonic worlds.
JOAQUÍN
SEGURA
34°23′30.5″N 132°27′7.5″E features the coordinates of one of the most iconic images seen by the world after Little Boy was dropped over Hiroshima, photographed by Yoshito Matsushige. At 8:15 am on August 6, 1945, an unidentified bystander was waiting for the local Sumitomo Bank branch to open, sitting on the steps leading to its front door. Upon impact, some of the individuals near ground zero were so affected by the atomic flash that the residue of their bodies remains even today on urban surfaces, now preserved at memorial sites. While the common understanding of this phenomenon is that such shadows were caused by instant vaporization of the bodies, further scientific research indicates this is inaccurate, as temperatures near the hypocenter would most likely have left carbonized remains instead.
Infamously known as the Human Shadow of Death, this haunting memorial constitutes a painful portrait of absence and the senseless obliteration of the societal and political body by 20th century warfare.
Joaquin Segura is a visual artist who lives and works in Mexico City. His artistic practice is centered around meditations on the phenomenology of history, power and truth, as well as extended engagement with notions such as sociopolitical microclimates, asymmetrical narratives and ideology in the contemporary world. Active since the early 2000s, Segura is also a founding member and board advisor at SOMA, Mexico City and currently serves on the Board of Directors at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, Omaha, NE.
HIMALI
SINGH SOIN
Himali Singh Soin is an artists and poet. Her works dissect the environments around and beyound her by amassing materials-literary, archival, fictions-to metaphorically reflect on human engagement and disengagment with the natural world. Her 2022 solo at The Art Institute of Chicago was an exploration of transnational nuclear culture. Her current research focuses on the metaphysics of saly, which began at DesertX in California and will continue in 2025 at Somerset House in London.
RAY
SMITH
HANNA
STIEGELER
The image depicted—taken from The New York Public Library’s Picture Collection— shows a destroyed jacket worn by a person that experienced the Nagasaki explosion. Stiegeler’s treatment of the archival image is in her repertoire of appropriation, where she veils the original material to disconnect it from its source depiction. The jacket —an item that connects with the artist’s interest on fashion— hanging on the chair somehow represents the immediacy and vulnerability of a nuclear war, drawing attention to the negative space a body leaves behind, a remembrance to the atomic shadow phenomenon.
Hanna Stiegeler (1985) is a German artist, she draws inspiration from historical and contemporary photographic material, including prints, textiles, and installation. Her works delve topics such as feminism, consumerism, psychology, and explore the surfaces of advertising and fashion.
MIKA
TAJIMA
Mika Tajima is an artist whose practice materializes techniques developed to shape the physicality, productivity, and desires of the human body. Her sculptures, paintings, videos, and installations focus on the embodied experience of ortho-architectonic control and computational life. Tajima's works operate in the space between the immaterial and the tangible to create heightened encounters that target the senses and emotions of the viewer, underlining the dynamics of control and agency.
DAVID
WARGOWSKI
The piece titled Silver People on the Shoreline shows a figure that appears etched by radiation. “Silver people” was a 1960s term, taken from the anti-war anthem Wooden Ships. Evokes not only the survivors but the becoming of a civilization responsible for catastrophe.
Wargowski is a photographic artist, researcher, and curator interested in visual and cultural history of nuclear science. Through cultural memory, Wargowski confronts the official legacies of the nuclear age. He is an advisory board member of The Atomic Heritage Foundation and the Atomic Photographers Guild.
APOLO
CACHO
In the form of a graphic epic, Mexican artists Apolo Cacho (1987), narrates the spiritual pulsations of an enslaved but living world, hostage to a nuclear-armed context. “No one should have the power to kill us all,” recall the 70s and 80s anti-nuclear slogans, which still resonate today. Through Mexica and Buddhist traditional imagery, countless characters parade, performing Butoh dances, depicting the transformation of the human soul as it travels through atomic hell on Earth.
After Hiroshima, silence took hold of Japan. The mass destruction and the nightmare images humanity witnessed required a new way to express the unpronounceable. Butoh was created as a spectral slow dance, converting sorrow into movement.
JULIAN
CHARRIÈRE
Polygon is a black and white poster featuring an abstracted photograph of the Semipalatinsk Nuclear Test Site in Kazakhstan, overlaid with names of some of the atomic devices detonated in the region between 1949 and 1989. Made on analogue medium format film, the original negatives were exposed to radioactive soil collected on site, manifesting as ghostly white apparitions on the work.
Julian Charrière is a French-Swiss artist based in Berlin. Bringing together sculpture, film and photography, his projects often stem from fieldwork in locations where acute geophysical identities have formed, from volcanoes to icefields and radioactive sites. Whether undertaking artistic expeditions or staging immersive installations, the core of his practice concerns itself with how the human being inhabits the world, and how it in turn inhabits us.
KEN DOMON
Ken Domon (1909-1990) was one of the most renowned Japanese photographers of the 20th century. He is most celebrated as a photojournalist. Domon was born in Sakata, Yamagata Prefecture. With the end of the war, Domon became independent and documented the aftermath of the war, focusing on society and the lives of ordinary people. He became known as a proponent of realism in photography, which he described as, “an absolute snapshot that is absolutely not dramatic.” He was a prolific contributor to photographic magazines, revived or started afresh through the early 1950s. He rejected posed and other artful photographs; in his polemics in the photographic magazines, Domon was the most forceful exponent of this view. He famously defined his goal as 'the direct connection between camera and motif.' Among Domon's most powerful images are those taken in the first decade or so after the war, particularly those of the survivors of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima.
Ken Domon, who became the first honorary citizen of Sakata in 1974, declared his wish to present his hometown with his entire collection of photographic works. In response, Sakata completed construction of the Ken Domon Museum of Photography in 1983 in Iimoriyama Park.
CARLA
FERNNEZ
‘Immoral.’ ‘Stupid.’ Two words encompass a message as direct as it is lapidary: there is no rational nor moral justification for the proliferation of nuclear armaments in today’s political landscape - if ever.
Nevertheless, the simplicity of said message acquires new dimensions due to its formal instance: the words appear, bold and overwhelming, on a piece of clothing, acting both as a mobile signboard and a commentary on fashion’s role in social commentary and transformation.
This is constitutive throughout the practice of Carla Fernández, a Mexican fashion designer whose ethic derives from the notion that ‘another fashion system is possible’ and who has worked tirelessly with her brand to create an inclusive, communal and sustainable productive environment.
Known primarily for her efforts to celebrate and preserve centuries-old textile techniques belonging to Indigenous communities and other popular collectives in Mexico, her work transcends simple notions of political posturing. Her Fashion House, managed along with partner Cristina Rangel, collaborates in the design and production processe with artisans all across Mexico, celebrating their living cultures and using the brand’s global presence to promote social justice and fair trade.
CARLOS
ALFONSO
Throughout his career, Carlos Alfonso (Popayán, Colombia, 1986) has focused his research on food anthropology, delicately placing food sovereignty as a central topic. His artistic work is shaped by his deep interest in the interdependent relationships on Earth, resultingin a practice grounded in encounter, care, and action. Blending anecdote, ancestral storytelling, and the narrative structure of recipes, traditional medicine, and South American imaginaries, he explores possibilities for exchanging knowledge between human and non-human worlds.With a clear and direct voice, Alfonso calls on us to declare 'Enough is enough!' as a guiding principle for sustaining life in the current geopolitical moment.
ROSA
BARBA
The image shown on the screen comes from Inside the Outset: Evoking a Space of Passage, 2021, a film by Rosa Barba. The site for this screening is an amphitheater with an open air cinema screen in the middle created by Rosa Barba in the buffer zone in Cyprus, which is a demilitarized zone, patrolled by the United Nations Peacekeeping Force in Cyprus (UNFICYP), that was established in 1964 and extended in 1974 after the ceasefire of 16 August 1974, following the Turkish invasion of Cyprus, and the de facto partition of the island into the area controlled by the Republic of Cyprus (excluding the British Sovereign Base Areas) and the largely unrecognized Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus in the north.The open-air cinema acts as peaceful site for the coming together of communities from both sides of a contested border