War and peace

If museums are a reflection of who we are, they are about to confront us with some unpalatable truths. Death and destruction will be everywhere in the coming months as venues ranging from London's Barbican to Ulster Museum and the University of Brighton host major exhibitions about the horrors of war.

The Brighton Photo Biennial opened in October under the title Memory of Fire: the War of Images and Images of War, and includes controversial photographs depicting the torture of Iraqi detainees by American troops at Abu Ghraib.

In London, the Barbican has just unveiled an exhibition of war photography, spanning the Spanish Civil War to the current conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, and including iconic work by Robert Capa and Gerda Taro.

Also in London, this month the considerable resources of the Wellcome Institute have been marshalled to create the Medicine and War exhibition.

Meanwhile, Wolverhampton Art Gallery and Coventry's Herbert Museum and Art Gallery have just secured a joint £200,000 grant from the Heritage Lottery Fund, enabling them to expand their already significant collections of war-related material.

And next June will see the launch of two new permanent exhibitions relating to The Troubles. One is an extensive digital archive focusing on artistic responses to the conflict, funded by Arts Council Northern Ireland, the other, a dedicated gallery at Belfast's Ulster Museum.

It's not all about the nitty-gritty of warfare, though. Next month's reopening of the Herbert, after a £20m refurbishment, will see its revamped history displays - telling the familiar story of Coventry's levelling in the Blitz - joined by a Peace and Reconciliation Gallery exploring the city's role in the worldwide peace fraternity.

But given that Britain has been mired in ongoing wars for the past seven years, and peace started breaking out in Northern Ireland a decade ago, why the surge of interest now? Sheila McGregor is a visual arts consultant who has helped develop a conference in Brighton this month on how museums portray war.

It is being organised by Engage, a national association for gallery education. She says: "It's as if we've arrived at a moment when we want to take stock of what Britain's been doing in other countries.

"We're on the cusp of major political change: the US presidential election is imminent, and there's the prospect of a new British government in a year or two. It's a convergence of factors, but the main one is probably that we've now reached enough of a distance from the events of 9/11, and also 7/7."

The Engage conference, which coincides with the last week of the photo biennial, is subtitled Rules of Engagement: Art, Conflict, and Gallery Education.

Focusing on the tensions affecting museums operating in war zones, it involves contributors as diverse as British artist Julian Germain, whose current War Memorial show at Portsmouth's Aspex gallery features photos by serving military personnel, and cultural historian Karmit Zysman, who established Kosovo's pioneering Discovery Centre to help survivors process their experiences in an educational context.

But alongside debates on familiar topics such as instrumentalism, McGregor hopes there will be serious discussion of the importance of museums exploring peace, as well as the reality of war.

Giving peace a chance

This determination to move away from a gung-ho approach and embrace a forward-looking, conciliatory worldview seems to be catching. In its new peace gallery, the Herbert will avoid not only traditional images and objects from the Blitz, but also material placing too much emphasis on the suffering of its victims.

Instead, it will primarily focus on Coventry's emergence as a standard-bearer for the global peace movement, through its ever-widening links with other cities devastated by war.

Project officer Natalie Heidaripour says: "The aim is to explore issues of peace and reconciliation in Coventry through history. Coventry has developed friendships with other cities heavily affected by conflict, and has 26 twin towns - more than anywhere else in Britain - including Dresden, Stalingrad, Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

"Based on our shared experiences, those friendships initially developed at civic level, and during the cold war, when these weren't easy to maintain, continued through the church."

A highlight of the Herbert's interactive displays will be a computer war game, Flashpoint, which offers a novel twist on the gory shoot-'em-ups popularised by Game Boy and Xbox. Replete with graphic novel-style imagery, it puts the player in the position of international mediator, rather than mercenary or military commander. Though they can choose to unleash bloodshed, the aim of the game is to resolve conflicts, not provoke them.

While it may have Britain's first publicly funded peace gallery, the Herbert is not the only UK museum to focus on diplomacy, rather than war. In 1992, the independently run Peace Museum was set up in Bradford by an alliance of Quakers and academics, after the inaugural International Conference of Peace Museums was held in the city.

It is due to expand in 2009 by moving into a 1,000sq metre space in the upcoming Senator George Mitchell Centre for Peace and Conflict Resolution in Leeds.

Peter van den Dungen, a visiting lecturer in the University of Bradford's Department of Peace Studies who was instrumental in establishing the museum, says: "We have a history of peace, as well as war, so why would we not have museums to document this? Some people can't imagine what you'd put in a peace museum - they think of banners and posters, and assume it'll be boring, but there's lots of rich literature."

Hearing the other side

Van den Dungen argues that worldwide protests against the Iraq war stimulated a growing public appetite for exploring the concept of peace, and the personal stories of its champions. He cites examples such as Oslo's Nobel Peace Museum, which focuses on the work of Nobel laureates, and a forthcoming museum opening in Cape Town's Desmond Tutu Peace Centre in 2010.

In Britain, interest in the spoils of peace is filtering through to unlikely places. These include the Royal Armouries in Leeds, which recently made room alongside its ranks of polished weapons for Bradford's touring Farewell to Arms exhibition, exploring the impact of banned armaments such as cluster bombs.

But whereas most peace museums avoid dwelling on violence, Brighton's approach couldn't be more different. Curator Julian Stallabrass's suite of hard-hitting shows are far from the romanticised interpretations beloved of unreconstructed regimental museums.

In its Brighton University exhibition, 70 snapshots documenting US marines' sadistic treatment of Abu Ghraib inmates have been juxtaposed with airbrushed army propaganda photos.

At the nearby Fabrica gallery, artist Thomas Hirschhorn is displaying The Incommensurable Banner - a wall festooned with images of horrific carnage. Elsewhere, there's a place for iconic images from Vietnam, including Nick Ut's award-winning photo of a nine-year-old girl fleeing a napalm strike on her village in 1972.

Distance to reflect

"The whole process has been difficult, but I had to keep reminding myself what I'm going through is nothing compared to the experiences of these people," confesses Stallabrass, when asked how he decided where to draw the line in depicting the brutality of war.

"There's a story about German soldiers who froze to death in Russia in the second world war - when Russian troops found them, they rearranged them like sculptures. Sometimes I feel like I'm doing the same thing."

Potentially as contentious as Stallabrass's choice of images is the biennial's implicit anti-war (or at least anti-Iraq war) message. He concedes the biennial has an agenda, but counters that so, too, does every exhibition. The test of their integrity, he argues, is their willingness to engage in open debate.

"I like to think of this as an anti-biennial," he says. "It's not like Venice, where you have a curator drawing together works and presenting them neutrally. This is the opposite: there's a strong theme, which I hope is cogent, and an implied argument. We invite people's response."

Heidaripour, whose new gallery openly espouses peaceful solutions to conflict, agrees: "Obviously, as a peace and reconciliation gallery we aren't offering an objective view about whether war or peace are good things. We present our ideas and highlight people's work and experiences, and visitors can make their own minds up."

Questions of impartiality aside, how do we judge when a conflict is sufficiently distant to become a legitimate museum target? The National Army Museum in London came close to suggesting no war was too close to explore when it opened Helmand: The Soldier's Story.

The exhibition included emails sent home by British paratroopers serving in Afghanistan and was shortlisted for this year's £100,000 Art Fund Prize. But in the end, the show (arising out a proposal by the army) steered clear of the politics behind the war, or its wider human costs.

Like the army museum, Wolverhampton exploits its distance as a virtue. Its Troubles gallery displays Conrad Atkinson's Silver Liberties without controversy - the same work provoked Protestant staff to storm out of the Whitechapel Gallery when shown in an exhibition curated by Nicholas Serota, now the director of Tate, in 1975.

But do museums sometimes venture onto dangerous ground by scrambling to interpret the immediate? Maurice Davies, deputy director of the Museums Association, feels that their role is primarily a reflective one - and to reflect meaningfully often requires distance of time, as well as location.

"Museums have attempted to engage with big issues," says Davies. "Some great work was done relating core collections to the anniversary of the abolition of the slave trade. Museums absolutely can deal with issues of current concern, but they shouldn't be newsy."

James Morrison is a freelance writer.