This week, Art at Watson unveiled their new exhibition, “Life After War,” a series of photographs by Amy Kaslow showcasing the impact war has on human lives.
The exhibit includes 15 portraits displayed alongside contextual storyboards, depicting war-related trauma and the toll of conflict on people’s mental health. It will be on display until Jan. 15 on the second floor of the Watson School for International and Public Affairs.
According to Kaslow, the series spans decades of her coverage as a reporter for a variety of news outlets, for which she has traveled the world extensively. Through her work, she collects images and stories of people “who are triumphing in the face of immense challenge,” she said in an interview with The Herald. “I also don’t withhold the sad and the ugly, which, unfortunately, there is a profound amount of.”
The Art at Watson committee selected Kaslow’s exhibit “because it breaks beyond the abstraction of war and refugees,” Jo-Anne Hart, co-chair of Art at Watson, told The Herald. The work is equal parts creative and analytical, Hart explained, which is “the connective tissue that makes this more than the pictures.”
Kaslow said that the destruction of war can be “so shocking” that it “pulls your skin off.”
“Victims live with their perpetrators and among the silent eyewitnesses to unspeakable atrocities,” she wrote in her artist’s statement on the exhibition. “They are crammed together behind the high fences of refugee camps, stuffed into detention centers, restricted to the most blighted, overcrowded parts of town and thrust into rural, remote oblivion.”
In the statement, Kaslow described how “‘the traumatized’ has become a major demographic.”
“The number of people damaged and disturbed promises to increase, given the nonstop growth in regional conflicts,” Kaslow wrote in the statement. “Our failure to reverse this trend will leave us a world in which most of us are emotionally unstable.”
But she told The Herald that she finds hope in the potential for change.
“As long as they have hope, and there are people around who can somehow help them, that gives me a bounce when I’m out there reporting a story,” she said. She noted that while “documentation and archival information is essential,” it is also important to prevent similar atrocities from occurring again.
Kaslow hopes viewers of the exhibition leave with a “to-do list” of changes they want to make in the world, no matter how big or small.
The exhibition has been displayed on college campuses across the country, including at Texas A&M University, Vassar College and Northwestern University. Kaslow likes showcasing the work to students because she believes in the power of younger generations to create “systemic change” and guarantee “a future for the world,” she told The Herald.
“Students are passionate,” Kaslow said. “That passion is very powerful, if deployed with intelligence.”
Hart said she is excited for the Watson School to host the exhibition, stressing that “the dimensionality of creative work is part of how we can learn and experience and appreciate and empathize and care” about issues like war.
“We’re living in a very difficult time with a huge amount of violence internationally and domestically,” Hart added. “There’s a lot going on, but art is a way to kind of invite you in and give you a chance to think about this and experience it beyond just the abstraction.”
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