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EXPLOSIvE FORCES: FEAR AND DESTRUCTION IN CONFLICT
One of the great ironies of contemporary culture is that the Nobel Prize exhibition of paintings and sculpture by Liz Ashburn, “Explosive Forces:
is named after the inventor of nitroglycerine, that now ancient ancestor Fear and Destruction in Conflict”.
of what has become to be known as the military industrial complex. This This exhibition is the culmination of a project where Ashburn has been re-
mysterious cartel maintains that their activities are in everyone’s best presenting images and cultural motifs from a distant geography that once
interests. It might not come as a surprise then, that there has been war existed mostly in our imaginations – the place of the birth of culture, the
in some part of the world every year since August 1945, the official end Fertile Crescent, the cities of Ur and Babylon, of Noah and Nebuchadnezzar,
of the Second world war. Nor would it be a surprise that in these conflict of exotic medieval Baghdad and the Biet il Hikmah, the House of wisdom
zones, that with a few notable exceptions, the tenets of liberal democracy where contemporary mathematics, algebra, astronomy and philosophy
– the rule of law, citizens’ rights to regular elections and free expression began. However Ashburn is not representing nostalgic views of a culture that
and association have been shown to be a post colonialist fantasy. Now, was once ascendant but is completely focused on creating contemporary
whether it is state sanctioned or caused by civil wars forced eviction of reflections about the theatres of war across the Middle East and Central
peoples, or as it is politely known, “population transfer”, is commonplace. Asia. This is a living culture albeit under constant threat. This geopolitical
Collateral damage, casualty sensitivity and sub-munitions, the official “flashpoint” has provide an extraordinary range of published images that
name for small easily dispersed landmines, are relatively new additions Ashburn then re-configures in watercolour, combining tonal representational
to the vocabulary. Maybe, this is the true language of twenty first century images with intricate richly coloured flat patterns derived from historical
postcolonial experience. They are also just a few of the contexts of the sites and miniatures made in Iraq, Iran and Afghanistan.

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