Topography of War

The photographs and videos exhibited here deliberately leave aside confrontation, body, collapse, injury, death. The exhibition thus brings together several bodies of work produced after 2000, which share a clear, explicit documentary ambition: a determined choice to display war in a totally disembodied manner, focusing rather on the sites, the positions, the geological or built spaces.

They are topographical essays in a sense, that favor a reading of war through its geography, however not denying the human cost of fighting.

In terms of military strategy, these iconographic choices coincide with the increased use of simulation techniques and the spread of long-range weaponry, but also with the military's media censorship and the virtual impossibility for photographers and video-makers to operate freely on the ground.

Is the territory of war becoming an abstract concept, an ideological construction, a given that could not be represented ?

-Jean-Yves Jouannais

Exhibited artists

Paola de Pietri
Jananne Al-Ani
Jo Ractliffe
An-My Lê
Harun Farocki
Donovan Wylie
Till Roeskens
Eyal Weizman et Luc Delahaye
Walid Raad
Collateral murder (wikileaks)

A book, Topography of War, co-published by Steidl/ LE BAL coincides with the exhibition including the works of: An-My Lê, Paola De Pietri, Harun Farocki, Jananne Al-Ani, Till Roeskens, Walid Raad, Eyal Weizman and Luc Delahaye.