Artists are in a unique position to communicate the painful aftermath of conflict
While we have muddled our way through a desultory summer, gnawed by anxieties about suicide bombings, knife and gun crime and breakdown in Iraq, one of the most thought- provoking contemporary art exhibitions on the theme of violence has been and gone at the Sainsbury Centre in Norwich, ignored by most of the London media - the fate of so many excellent regional shows. Fortunately, "AfterShock" has been given a second, smaller, run in two other out-of-town venues, which will help bring it to the wider audience it deserves.
"AfterShock" considers the territory between shock, aftershock and "after the shock": between the initial blast that numbs and dumbs the witnesses who survive, persistent or occasional reminders of the event, and the point where it is possible to step away from stupefaction to look at the histories, outlines and legacies of trauma. Even at this much later point, the show makes clear, the pain and brutality of what has happened may make it almost impossible to grasp.
Yasmin Canvin, the curator, has taken a number of risks with the exhibition, resisting the pressure to impose "balance" or homogeneity. The work addresses the fallout of conflicts in places as dissimilar as Lebanon, India, Colombia, Northern Ireland, Rwanda and the United States, with triggers ranging from communal to racial divisions, from the political to the sociocultural. After initial research for a show with Indian artists, the canvas was allowed to expand and evolve, eventually encompassing 16 artists from across the world, but retaining a bias towards practitioners from the subcontinent. Video work predominates but is complemented by paintings, photographs and image-text constructs. Such a mix could have left the viewer confused and impatient. In fact, the variety of narratives and alternative viewpoints brings together a coherent, illuminating exhibition.
Four questions come to the fore: how is conflict relevant to "us" in, for example, "peaceful East Anglia"? Is it possible for "us" to appreciate what has happened when we are so far from the front line? What are the mechanisms of violence? Are we as isolated from the action as we think? Behind much of this sits the experience of receiving news of shock (and "awe") in our living rooms, bedrooms, bathrooms, kitchens; on the radio, on television, in the papers; not only daily but hourly, momentarily. How do we process this, how do we live with it, what do we do about it?
Alfredo Jaar, a Chilean, is one of the artists featured who most powerfully addresses our uneasy relationship with the media. He juxtaposes 17 consecutive Newsweek covers, beginning on 6 April 1994, with text that briefly charts the contemporaneous Rwandan genocide. While the current-affairs weekly splashes on bear markets, Singapore's caning of an American vandal, Hillary Clinton, media wars, sport, O J Simpson and domestic violence, 900,000 people are killed. Finally, it dedicates its first ever cover to the event on 1 August. Jaar's own experience of visiting Rwanda in 1994 illustrates the challenge that violence presents to an artist. When he returned from the country, he felt unable to use the images he had taken there. His first work featured only the name Rwanda in huge light-boxes. For a subsequent piece, he hid his photographs in archival boxes with a description of the horrors he had witnessed on the outside.
Roland Barthes described the problems surrounding the portrayal of trauma, saying that shocking photographs "fill the sight by force", stop language and defeat imagination. "AfterShock" has the advantage of distance from the original events and thus the possibility of perspective. The work of David Farrell and Fernan do Traverso, from Northern Ireland and Argen tina respectively, serves as a reminder of those who "disappeared" as a result of conflict. In 1999 the IRA revealed where it had buried ten people, mostly Catholics, whose fate had remained unknown since the 1970s and 1980s. Farrell's large, rich colour photographs of the sites in the Irish Republic follow in the tradition of British landscape painting: elegiac, luscious, hinting at the sublime, undercut only by the marks of excavation and investigation that followed the IRA's statement.
Traverso's work 350, by contrast, is modest and make-do, a photographic record of his memorial to the 350 friends and fellow activists who disappeared from his home town, Rosario, during Argentina's military dictatorship in the mid-1970s and early 1980s. Twenty years later, in 2001, Traverso began to spray-paint stencils of abandoned bicycles - the first sign that someone had been taken away - on the walls of what is now a city of more than one million. Three years later he had painted 350. It touched a nerve: banners stencilled with ownerless bicycles began to appear on marches and at festivals, not just in Argentina, but around the world.
The sense of human life wiped away hangs behind much of "AfterShock", but is nowhere so potent as in Juan Manuel Echavarría's video Bocas de Ceniza ("mouths of ash"). Against a white background, seven Colombian men and women sing songs about surviving a massacre or witnessing conflict. The camera frame is fixed and tight, from forehead to chin: we can do nothing other than turn away or meet their eyes - eyes that seem to be reliving their experiences as they look out.
Amar Kanwar's A Season Outside explores the legacy of Indian partition 60 years ago. The video, which has also been on show at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in London this summer, is a subtle, provocative meditation on the infectiousness of violence. Weaving in his family's experience, Kanwar asks whether violence can ever be justified - even in self-defence - fearing that it leads only to a cycle of violence from which none of us may be immune.
Simon Norfolk touches on the larger dynamics and mechanisms of violence. In 2003, having returned from Afghanistan, Norfolk began documenting Ascension Island, the South Atlantic base for Echelon, an electronic surveillance system that allows Britain and the US to intercept emails, phones and fax links across the world. The stark, beautiful pictures portray a remote landscape put to brutal use. In a note, Norfolk makes the point that "while 'rolling news' and 'embedded journalists' saturate us with the showbiz of war, the really interesting developments - submarine warfare, space weapons, electronic warfare and eavesdropping - are essentially invisible".
Shilpa Gupta's installation interrogates another invisible component of warfare - consumerism - occupying territory that seems at once tangential and central. A complicated piece, it has not been included in the Hert fordshire show because of limited space, but deserves mention. In a wall projection, seven female figures dressed in camouflage (a fashion that became popular with the 2003 invasion of Iraq) dance to the click of the viewer's mouse. Their movements, which are somewhere between exercise routine and military drill, are accompanied by mantras that stream along in front of the figures, dotting from commands to kill, march, stay, not look, be silent and pray, to orders that seem to be clamours for new goodies: a phone, a bag. The mix is a potent comment on our increasing willingness to dance when we are asked to - to invade Iraq, for example - even as we close our eyes and ears to the consequences.
There is little comfort to be had from "AfterShock", but in place of sensationalism, easy answers and silence it offers sensation, complexity and engagement. In short, it offers life in the face of death and trauma. We have a choice, as Susan Sontag noted in her last book, Regarding the Pain of Others: "People don't become inured to what they are shown . . . because of the quantity of images dumped on them. It is passivity that dulls feeling."
"AfterShock" is at the University of Hertfordshire Galleries in St Albans and Hatfield until 27 October. For more details log on to: http://perseus.herts.ac.uk
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