Three New York Shows Confront War's Spectacle and Complicity

In May 2026, during New York's art fair season, three exhibitions on the Upper East Side, in Brooklyn, and the West Village tackled the representation of war and the viewer's position. At a penthouse on the Upper East Side, Giles Duley's 'Distortion / Memory / Resilience' featured Ukrainian children's drawings, portraits of former UNITA child soldiers, and a simulated bomb shelter with a real-time air-raid siren. At Pioneer Works in Brooklyn, the archive Khajistan presented 'Office of War Information (O.W.I.)', recreating a WWII-era propaganda office with declassified US military leaflets from Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya, alongside episodes of 'The Simpsons' and 'Everybody Loves Raymond'. In the West Village, Jill Magid's 'Pooler Room' at Mister Fahrenheit transformed a former swimming pool used by Vietnam veteran Robert Muller into an installation referencing Muller's 1971 anti-war speech at Columbia University, FDR's therapy pool, and the Nixon-era press room. The shows critique how artworld spectacles can distance viewers from the realities of war, with Magid urging viewers to imagine themselves as perpetrators rather than righteous witnesses.