מוּזֵיאוֹן שְׁאָרֵי הַמִּלְחָמָה

War Remnants Museum

War Remnants Museum (from Leftovers), 2023-5
Digital Collage, 275 cm x 220 cm

War Remnants Museum was created out of a need to dismantle the mechanisms through which trauma is displayed—or perhaps out of a personal fixation I have with war-preservation sites, most of them in Eastern Europe: underground nuclear bunkers in Latvia and Moscow that have been turned into “war parks,” semi-improvised military museums in Poland, memorials to the atrocities of the Gulag, and more. These sites strive to make the past present—but often do so through a language of simulacra, of theatrical pathos, of installations that conceal horror beneath layers of dramatic lighting, polished glass, and generic soldier mannequins with tourist-grade helmets and uniforms that are just a bit too crisp. In many of them, collective memory is curated and staged, and personal loss is swallowed by a political-national narrative and a grotesque aesthetic.

This work was created as an attempt to take the visual tropes and gestures of these sites—and push them to the extreme. The central image-collage is that of a museum that was never built. A display site with no visitors. A forest—not a city, not a military zone, not a memorial—within which semi-transparent exhibition halls are placed like forgotten ice cubes scattered among the trees. The mannequins, the dead, the remains—all sealed in glass, reflected through a system of mirrors. Not to be preserved, but to be framed. An endless accumulation of memories and trauma compressed into an architectonic space that is geometrically impossible.

In reality, ground battles mostly took place outside of walls: in forests, in trenches, in the cold, underground. This work keeps the forest there—it does not replace it with a museum structure, but rather injects into it the architecture of institutional memory. In other words, this is not a display within a museum, but a museum within a battlefield—layered and stratified, from the forest floor where the battles occurred to the subterranean depths where command units were protected in reinforced bunkers.

The result is a double gesture: on one hand, the familiar exhibition grammar—low and high-contrast lighting, meticulous composition, vitrines, placards; and on the other hand, a visual that functions as an anti-memory: a complete absence of context, narrative, chronology. In most cases, there is no way to move from one gallery space to another. The mannequins—mostly lying down, mute, repetitive—do not represent specific soldiers but rather the loss of the body in a space where the narrative is already sealed, much like the generic nicknames used to refer to foot soldiers in the world wars: “Ivan” (the Red Army), “Fritz” (the Wehrmacht), or “Tommy” (the British infantryman).

In War Remnants Museum I do not seek to reconstruct, nor to provoke. I try to take the folk logic of “trauma display” to its limits—and through that, to expose the brutal gap between representation and trauma itself.