Topographies de la guerre at Le Bal, Paris: A Photographic Inventory of Battlefields

The exhibition 'Topographies de la guerre' at Le Bal in Paris (September 17 – December 18, 2011) explores the evolving concept of the battlefield through photography and documentary images. Curated by Jean-Yves Jouannais and Diane Dufour, the show presents a visual inventory of war theaters, from the easily surveyed plain of Waterloo to the dispersed combat zones of Afghanistan. Jouannais, known for his work on artists without works and folly in art, has been compiling an 'encyclopedia of war' and lectures on polemology at the Centre Pompidou. The exhibition includes works by Roger Fenton (1855 Crimean War 'Valley of Death'), Philippe Bazin ('Battle Landscapes' series showing battlefields as ordinary landscapes), Sophie Ristelhueber (landscape scars), Anne-Marie Filaire (archaeological coldness in Ethiopia), Harun Farocki ('Serious Games' repurposing war video game aesthetics), Walid Raad (archival work on Lebanese civil war), and Till Roeskens ('Videocartographie: Aïda, Palestine' mapping checkpoints). The show questions how to depict war retrospectively, avoiding both cold archaeology and tragic metaphor, and emphasizes demonstrative, informative images over aestheticization. A catalog is published by Steidl.