Thursday 7 July 2011

Images of war

I have been to the Imperial War Museum in Salford on many occasions. It is a stunning building that is designed to make one feel uncomfortable and disorientated: the floor rises and falls, the angles everywhere are unexpected, the viewing platform with a vista across Manchester is built in a manner to disturb. War, after all, does all of these things.

I have sometimes felt that the building over shadows the collections. However today there were two new exhibits that  added to my sense of discomfiture. The first was the mangled wreckage of a car that had contained a bomb; it had gone off in Baghdad and presumably killed innocent people. The second was a piece of art work that portrayed a city in ruins after a bombing attack. Neither were easy pieces to view.


This piece of artwork is hanging from the roof of the museum.
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2 comments:

  1. celine7 July 2011 at 20:04

    Good man for sharing

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  2. Elizabeth Musgrave8 July 2011 at 22:09

    I used to feel uncomfortable about war museums, as if I were being asked to find conflict entertaining in some way. The Jewish Museum in Berlin made me feel quite differently. That was another very unsettling place to be in.

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