This project studies the trajectory of war art from 1937 and identifies the growing socio-political need of the time, along with the advancement in print and media technology contributed to the shift in society’s perception of war. This further identifies and studies four key war graphic types: paintings, posters, comic books and cartoons, and photo-journalism, so as to gather the visual symbolisations that feeds into propaganda, and also broadly categorises individual war art genres into groups based on the subject focused by the artists.
The project consisted of each chapter represented by a book. Finally, all research spread across six books with each topic given individuality and scope for exploring as much detail as possible.
The project consists of six books. Each book represents a chapter.
The trajectory of war art is collectively referred to as evolution of war graphics by the project. The evolutions in terms of technology and ideology have together contributed to making war art a very powerful tool for propaganda. This project studies four types of war art genres namely paintings, posters, comic books and cartoons, and photographs and photojournalism. It uses the examples of these propaganda media through time to form the visual language for the end artefacts. The secondary research carried out for this project is presented in the form of individual catalogue presented below.
Evolution of victimisation (POSTER):
The goal of the project is to encourage people to reflect on the impact of the past wars and how it has led to more conflicts in the present day. It highlights events in recent history to bring aspects of the conflict into people`s consciousness and question some of the unacceptable incidents of war like ethnic cleansing, the large death count of innocent civilian and soldiers,sexual war time crimes and abuse of political power. The project aims to propagate the need to resort for peaceful negotiations instead of wars that only result in more war.
The outcome of the project is series of propaganda posters that address the issue. The poster does deflects from the evolution theory; it only uses the essence of the theory. The attribute of victimisation depicted in the poster holds true for some of the victims and at the same time is debatable for others. Acceptance of this list of victims is entirely dependent on the perspective of the audience
WAR, What has it been about?
(Postcard series)
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This postcard series consists of five cards, each one illustrating one aspect of war. The series shows the grim realities of war. It is a satirical implication of the fact the war has been about many things, but attaining peace is not one of them.
