Sixty years after its invention, the nuclear bomb is still the same as it
ever was. Once regarded as revolutionarily compact and immensely maneuverable
- transportable anywhere in the world on a small airplane - it is now hard
to believe that the most terrifying thing in the world could be so massive.
Large, heavy capsules falling to the ground, turning everything to ash: cities
destroyed, their inhabitants burnt. Now we fear made-to-measure pathogens,
which find their way silently, invisibly into every home. These weapons are
so invisible that we can't even be sure of their existence.
We are so used to continual advances in technology that we are reluctant to believe that the greatest destructive power that we are capable of has not changed for 60 years. At the same time, even automobiles still operate on the same technological principles that were developed over a century ago. We live with the bomb, just as we carry on wearing shoes and opening doors. The only difference is that nobody actually uses it.
The last time there was widespread fear of Nuclear War, around twenty years ago, it was not the existence of nuclear weapons that people were afraid of, but their ongoing proliferation. They thought that if humankind could theoretically destroy itself many times over, it would do so, for real, at least once.
Since the end of the Cold War, we have forgotten how to be afraid of Nuclear War. When we think of the nuclear bomb, the most we can imagine is a madman holding a single hand grenade. In films, books and computer games, they are defused again and again in the nick of time.
Like space travel, Nuclear War has for decades created a vast new territory for the imagination. People have envisaged two enemy blocs fighting a final war in which a blazing fire consumes the world. In science fiction novels and films, great writers and filmmakers such as Stanley Kubrick, Stanislaw Lem, Phillip K. Dick and Paul Verhoeven imagined possible worlds during or after a Nuclear War. Artists, however, have tended to subordinate themselves to the idea of the impossibility of adequate representation. After the Holocaust and Hiroshima, Picasso's Guernica seemed to be the last great work of art to use avant-garde estrangement to express the "true horror" of destruction and thus also the limits of existence.
All the artists we have
invited live in countries that are not under any immediate nuclear threat.
For them, Nuclear War is a danger for remote regions. This means that they
can deal with the possibility of Nuclear War without having to react to the
up-to-the-minute versions of the threat presented in the media.
Nearly all
of them created new artworks for the exhibition.