In The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century (1983), Svetlana Alpers proposed a way of thinking about images that felt almost unheard of at the time. While drawing a contrast between Italian Renaissance art and Flemish painting, she argued that Flemish painting tended toward a suspension of a scene instead of privileging grand, mythological narratives. The Flemish image, in her view, does not seek to tell a story so much as to hold a scene in place, to describe rather than to resolve meaning. In this sense, its politics lies in its refusal to narrate or instruct too clearly.
Drawing on this art-historical perspective, Chus Martínez has curated Roman Khimei and Yarema Malashchuk’s exhibition Pedagogies of War, which opened on March 3 at the Thyssen-Bornemisza National Museum, and organised in collaboration with TBA21. Khimei and Malashchuk situate their filmic practice within a broader philosophical reflection on war, images, and the ways we learn to see conflict. Martínez connects them and Alpers’ ideas to the thinking of Immanuel Kant and Carl von Clausewitz, who understood war as a practice that is exercised, organized, and sustained by states and institutions. Clausewitz’s distinction between large-scale, spectacular conflict and the long stretches of uncertainty he famously described as the “fog of war” becomes a key lens to understand the exhibition. Although public images tend to privilege the moments of impact and spectacle, much of what defines war happens in this fog—in waiting, anticipation, calculation, and invisible preparation. With this in mind, Pedagogies of War asks how images train us to perceive full-scale conflicts, and what kinds of visual practices might resist such training.
War is thus framed in the exhibition not only as a geopolitical event but as a perceptual condition. AWC sat down with the curator and the artists to talk about ways of reconstructing memory, sustaining critical thought, and imagining forms of collective life that do not submit to the apparent inevitability of war.
María Inés Plaza Lazo: The exhibition frames war not as an event, but as an operative system that trains us for a certain situation. What curatorial decisions helped you address that systemic violence without turning it into a spectacle?
Chus Martinez: By not working with the spectacle of war. For me, it’s an emotional decision because of the work I previously did with Harun Farocki. We did an exhibition together in 2003—I was involved as a friend, not as a curator. He was constantly telling us that we should not replicate images of the world and how important it is not to make us consumers of the suffering of other people. He said that we should understand that images show, but you don’t really see. Seeing is not understanding. You see any number of things, and then you see bombing and you feel that you are at the end of the event, but you’re not.
When we were talking together and experimenting—I’ve been working with Roman and Yarema since 2024 for the 36th Ljubljana Biennale—they would only focus on how everyday life has changed through, as well as on gender and class. The exhibition is about this change.
Roman Khimei, Yarema Malashchuk, You Shouldn't Have to See This, 2024. Video still, 2024. © Mathias Völzke. Installation view "Animals", Kunstverein Hannover 2025
MIPL: Roman and Yarema consciously exclude imagery of war without refusing the narrative of it.
CM: Yes, they are like Bertolt Brecht. They are in the middle of the war, so avoiding it is not an option—but replicating it isn’t either. In that sense, they are very important for me, because we need a younger generation of people talking about these wars in Palestine, Ukraine—
MIPL: —the occupation of Venezuela, the massacres in Iran, Rojava…
CM: …and try to go through art and culture in order to stop its replication.
MIPL: Roman and Yarema, you seem to film lethargy—until it becomes charged. This atmosphere is palpable in every single work of the exhibition. How do you protect this state of contemplation from an attention economy optimized for shock?
Yarema Malashchuk: We try to understand what it means to live in a country at war, which is such an extreme environment. For centuries, we have faced many different types of representations of war that have circulated. With this overwhelming surplus of images and the multiplication of representations of war, we decided to shift the representation to the image of representation.
We realized that it’s not enough to just document atrocities or what the news has already been focusing on extensively for years. That’s why we used the tool that is closest to reality—the moving image. At the advent of photography, it was meant to be nature representing itself. Then later, Godard considered the moving image to be more truthful than photography.
Roman Khimei: We decided to turn our camera in different directions, to cultivate—or rather to pay attention to—this state of in between. I call it the in-between: in between the explosions, in between climax events.
Open World explores how children maintain an emotional bond with the homeland they were forced to leave, and how technology reshapes their sense of belonging and resilience. The story follows a boy who fled after the Russian invasion and returns to Ukraine through a robotic dog. / Roman Khimei, Yarema Malashchuk, Open World, 2025. Video still. Courtesy of the artists.
MIPL: Were you able to avoid that by leaving the country?
YM: We never left the country. We live in Kyiv. Sometimes we are able to travel though. The government gives us permission to go for a certain amount of time, and we have to come back right after it finishes. It’s a very regulated and complicated process, with dozens of documents to prepare for just a week in Madrid. Since we are not participating in the war directly, we thought to focus on this state between action and non-action, and to focus on the boredom that is being lost—or that feels surreal—when you wake up and go for a coffee in Kyiv after a night of bombardment.
RK: Then there are thoughts from American cinema theory, film history, and screenwriting discourse. Following Gilles Deleuze, Syd Field suggested that film storytelling shifted toward the non-narrative in the last 30 or 40 years after World War II. Let’s say it was a denial of narrative—a period of denying narrative in cinema.
YM: Today, this Deleuze–Syd Field period is somewhat forgotten in art and media, which has returned to narrative.
RK: We often laugh about it. Before the full-scale invasion, Ukrainian art was full of different research topics. And then it was suddenly like we went back 75 years to the horrors of World War II and all this trauma. Ukrainian society, and probably society in general, is overrun with narrative again.
MIPL: Do you think that narration as “productive trauma” is being instrumentalized by everyone and not just Ukrainians?
RK: Everyone is using trauma in order to overcome reality. Since the invasion began four years ago, perception has changed, year after year. At the beginning, it was mostly personal reflection. Then it became a more collective reflection on war. Now, I believe many artists are trying to find a personal relation to this state of emergency without direct links to war. I think we now have a better understanding about how art is not politics—it doesn’t simply produce political statements and help the “good cause.” It’s a different practice. It can be implemented on different levels, but it’s not just a tool. I think Ukrainian art is on a good trajectory these days.
We Didn't Start This War explores the daily realities of life under a state of war and the complex entanglements it creates. The title echoes a mantra invoked by Ukrainians in the wake of the Russian invasion, asserting their refusal of the conflict. The work dwells precisely in this tension, existing on the fine, almost imperceptible line between war and its absence. / Roman Khimei & Yarema Malashchuk, We Didn't Start This War, 2026. Still courtesy of the artists.
MIPL: How do you handle the thin line between peaceful absence and the real physical presence of war?
RK: I’ll try to answer with our Open World (2025) project. Absence here is about how situations we create deny or support storytelling or the telling of history. Open World is, at first, a documentary film with direct storytelling that references Homer’s Odyssey and when the protagonist returns home. But from another perspective, it’s just a livestream without a beginning and without an end.
When we constructed the situation with the avatar, we turned traditional nostalgia into something absurd. We didn’t invent something unique. It’s a result of global video connection. We all have a global obsession with images, a global livestream condition. The technical reproducibility of images denies traditional storytelling. In this sense, absence is no longer absence. In the context of a livestream, your absence, my absence, Yarik’s absence at home don’t exist anymore. So, the word “absence” has to change. Its connotation has to change—not only in Ukraine, but globally.
MIPL: The same with distance, I guess?
RK: Yes. Fundamental terms like absence, resilience, nostalgia—they’ve changed their traditional meanings since the world has changed. It’s a new condition.
YM: To follow up on your question about not aestheticizing the danger of war: the last work speculates on this danger. The title is We Didn’t Start This War (2026). You see three screens of everyday life in Kyiv. Then there is a climax when “danger” arrives, but it’s just an accident on the street. Someone eats a bee or a wasp, something small and banal. The outcome is normal.
We play with this perception that Ukraine equals war, Ukraine equals explosions. When you see an artwork from Ukraine, you expect something dramatic to happen. This expectation is didactic. We want to question how to not aestheticize this danger, how to not aestheticize the state of emergency we are living in, and how to free ourselves from that.
MIPL: You confront viewers with that. I wonder how you see the difference between witnessing and consuming images of war today.
RK: This is close to Susan Sontag’s thoughts in Regarding the Pain of Others (2003). Documentary images are no longer sufficient. At the beginning of photography, the image was enough—you had testimony. But this changed after World War II. Photography now needs context, text.
In our installation, the images alone are not sufficient. They look like Google images of sleeping children—not war images, not journalistic or stock images. We create this terrible zone where photography returns to context.
YM: Photography can’t exist without context anymore, I think.
Roman Khimei, Yarema Malashchuk, Open World, 2025. Video still. Courtesy of the artists.
MIPL: What does it mean to care for an image today?
RK: There is compassion, but also voyeurism. The viewer moves between screens of sleeping children. You feel tenderness, but also discomfort at your own position as a consumer of images. We wanted to create tension between witnessing and relief with an awareness of your role in consuming images. To care for an image means to pass through that discomfort.
MIPL: You ask for care by creating proximity between tenderness and violence.
RK: Yes. We don’t have a clear answer. Even Sontag didn’t give one. We can’t limit the circulation of images. We can’t control exposure. Images will continue to be produced. But we have to care about them, and about ourselves, so we don’t turn them into trauma machines.
MIPL: In works like You Shouldn’t Have to See This (2024) and The Wanderer (2022), imitation and bodily proximity seem to produce knowledge that archives cannot. When you reenacted the postures of fallen soldiers, what did your bodies learn that research couldn’t teach?
RK: This work is often interpreted in very broad ways. Sometimes that turns into tokenization. But the image of the dead body is always complex. The dead soldier doesn’t belong to a country anymore. He’s dead. He becomes a body in nature and is no longer ideology. This idea is already present in Goya and post-World War II reflections. War is not only about winners and losers, but about suffering.
MIPL: Goya’s Black Paintings are just across the street. There is a vis-à-vis between The Wanderer and the collection at the Prado.
YM: Yes, I went from the Black Paintings directly to the exhibition. We wanted to confront the Western romantic view of war. Early on, we felt that the West framed the war as a conflict between two equal sides that should “just stop fighting.” Ukrainians experienced this as deeply problematic.
There was even a theatrical piece in Germany with Ukrainian and Russian flags holding hands. This kind of gesture suggests moral superiority: forgiving the aggressor. We turned this into an absurd idea—posing ourselves as dead Russian soldiers on Ukrainian soil. It’s a parody of Western intellectual reflection on aggressors and victims.
RK: We turn the camera back on ourselves. We don’t invent something new. This is connected to Russian necropolitics—the romanticization of the soldier as something disposable. We reenact it ourselves instead of outsourcing this reflection from others.
YM: There’s a superstition: you shouldn’t pretend to be dead. Only actors can play dead.
CM: I think this is very similar to Sharon Lockhart’s suspension of action. When you suspend action, then you start doing portraiture. Of course, the Prado is full of political artists like Velázquez and Goya. Velázquez was obsessed with sending you to places to see that are very difficult to interpret—hiding the queen and the king so that you actually don’t know what you are looking at.
In that sense, Open World, which TBA21 commissioned, and these “meninas of love” in You Shouldn’t Have to See This are in the same philosophical line. We talked a lot about that, and I was telling them that, for me as a Spaniard, it would be really amazing to close that circle—and that it could happen in the travel between both places.
You Shouldn't Have to See This portrays Ukrainian children who were abducted into Russian territory but later returned. Their sleeping figures evoke tenderness and discomfort simultaneously—the act of watching implicates the viewer. It is estimated that between 20,000 and over a million children have been abducted since 2014. This video makes a war crime that demands witnesses be visible. / Roman Khimei, Yarema Malashchuk, You Shouldn't Have to See This, 2024. Video still, 2024. © Mathias Völzke. Installation view "Animals", Kunstverein Hannover 2025
MIPL: You don’t only close it, you also expand it by going from suspension to mediation to pedagogy. By naming the exhibition Pedagogies of War, where does mediation end and where does pedagogy begin?
CM: The sentence is inspired by Brecht, who was very clear that you don’t learn facts from war. What you learn is the radical transformation of conditions. Brecht said there is a difference between things you experience firsthand and things you experience through art. He says: Things experienced firsthand should be avoided. You shouldn’t be a soldier. But art can sublimate that experience and give it to you as a reason to avoid it.
Everyone thinks that war and defense are the only options right now. Historically, it seems that everyone thinks war is unavoidable—but this is very bad thinking. War is something we can avoid. It is a practice, as Kant said. And if it is a practice, it means you can avoid it. There are ways of never going there. But there are people who want to go there—it’s their intention.
With this in mind, the pedagogy has to do with creating a non-violent society. The possibility of learning from the moment when everything is suspended and from when the radicality of violence reaches its peak level—you should understand that going there is not an option.
MIPL: My question also relates specifically to the mediation guide the museum offers. How did you reach the decision to have that set of questions, which also look like a pedagogical exercise?
CM: We started this at the Biennial in Ljubljana, where we gave questions to the audience. We increasingly want to activate this. Many people come to our exhibitions for many different reasons and some people go home and talk about the exhibition. In case that doesn’t happen, we provide a series of materials that may guide a conversation with your children, your partners, or your friends.
MIPL: Why?
CM: Because we need to come back to artworks—not only to visit and consume and “get it.” You know the popular expression: “Oh, I’m going to go to an exhibition, I hope I get it.” Well, it’s not about getting anything. We are not providers. We are in an osmotic relationship. You may come ten times, and every time you realize something different about yourself, your life, the world, or the museum…
MIPL: You mentioned Farocki and Svetlana Alpers as two candles for your curatorial thinking about this exhibition. What viewing behavior do you hope to cultivate throughout the exhibition rooms?
CM: I would like to remind people that we are in a tradition, and this tradition is our community. When we talk about community-making, it’s not only people, but also those situations and events that are very important in marking who we are as a society. I think it’s politically important to remember who we are, the type of productions that come out of our institutions, and then situate ourselves there. We should stop finding enemies and antagonisms in culture, and try to be very generous to everyone, no matter the ideology. It is fundamental now. I insist that this is a moment to be together.
Roman Khimei, Yarema Malashchuk, The Wanderer, 2022. Installation view, Ecologies of Peace II, C3A. Photo: Imagen Subliminal
MIPL: Memory and solidarity entail a bit more generosity than we see these days within the cultural sphere, but also with Fernand Braudel’s notion of the longue durée.
CM: Yeah, it’s so important. Look twenty years back, and twenty years ahead. We are losing that sense, and we shouldn’t be.
MIPL: How do you decide when an image has lasted long enough to shift from passive looking into embodied witnessing?
CM: I don’t know. I think I do curatorial meditation. I sit many, many times in a room and ask myself: what do I remember? When did I see it? What did it mean to me? And then I try to connect it. This is something I ask of everyone. I want us to remember and to connect.
For example, when I was reading Svetlana Alpers, I was thinking about the videos of Manon de Boer, who is Belgian. She was suspending the image. Then I thought about Sharon Lockhart, Pine Flat, portraying children. Then I thought about Rineke Dijkstra and Jérôme Bel portraying children. Then I thought about Velázquez portraying children. I try to trace roots of the same type of observation that artists have done on our behalf. What are we observing when we observe a child? Are we observing something almost mythological, representing a time in the past in biology—what it could become or not become, a promise that may or may not be realized?
All these questions matter. I think we should really reclaim these conversations and this complexity. Otherwise, we go into moral schemes where we just blame others, and we want images to be good images or bad images, in the hands of good people or bad people, to portray good things or bad things. I don’t think like that. I think we should move out of that moral quest and into something complex that starts to produce a net—a safety net—that really helps us to contest what’s going on.
We don’t want what’s happening now. We don’t want that type of society or war. We are not oriented toward destruction.
MIPL: What does this curatorial mediation reveal to you that the intensity of the world currently hides?
CM: Right now, I am speechless because I have no idea whether we are at the beginning of a total disaster, and what that would mean, or just another disastrous episode of an “anecdotal” war with major destruction. But people are still not waking up. I think we really need to reinstate conversations about what we want. Culture is great for that. You’re not going to do that in the office.
MIPL: Would you say that this exhibition, or making exhibitions like this, is a resistance to war propaganda—or does this also take the risk of normalizing the intolerable?
CM: I think art is resistance, per se. It doesn’t need to take only one particular form to be resistance.
MIPL: If this peaceful resistance is framed as a collective condition, how can it move beyond a symbolic gesture?
RK: We are not refusing to depict war. We are refusing to depict war as it is. We don’t contradict documentary practices like Mstyslav Chernov’s 20 Days in Mariupol or Robert Capa’s proximity ethics. It’s just a different image practice. We not only want to leave homogeneous documentation behind, but also documented complexity.
YM: We don’t claim this is the right way to represent war. It’s just our way, in a war that is already over-documented. We step aside—not as a moral stance, but as another perspective.
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- Cover Image:
The Wanderer was created weeks after Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Malashchuk and Khimei reframe fallen Russian occupiers through the lens of Caspar David Friedrich's romantic painting, critiquing the sublimation of death and colonial gazing. Referencing Fast Reaction Group's 1994 series, Malashchuk and Khimei challenge Western perspectives on the war while naming Russia's presence as a colonial occupation. / Roman Khimei, Yarema Malashchuk, The Wanderer, 2022. Video still. Courtesy of the artists.
