Cease and Begin Anew

 

Many visual associations and political questions arise when we look at Šejla Kamerić’s installation Cease. A minimal yet highly visible symbolic intervention stands in the centre of the square. The installation openly demonstrates the artist’s irritation with the existing state of affairs – the protracted, complicit, even directly responsible position of the international and especially the European community in the world’s state of perpetual war, where peace increasingly becomes a matter of collateral damage rather than our ultimate desired goal. Kamerić’s gesture commands attention by dominating the central space of the square, drawing not only visitors attending the Biennale but also passersby. Its monumental aesthetic is encapsulated in a minimalist arrangement of a monument: a pedestal, a red pole, and a white flag. Furthermore, the gesture and positioning of the white flag occasionally fluttering in the blue sky, but at half-mast, incites our imagination: has the time finally come to pay our respects and mourn the victims and the oppressed of all current wars? Does the customary gesture of lowering a flag to half-mast, a gesture traditionally employed by sovereigns to signify profound national mourning, prompt a sense of accountability? Can European governments – historically engaged not merely as bystanders but as participants in wars, the arms trade, in the normalization of warfare, occupation, and new Cold War geopolitics – be compelled to recognize their responsibility?

The three “ready-made” elements – monumental form, white flag, and a half-mast – definitively do not simply indicate some acceptance of surrender of a supposedly weaker side to a stronger power embodying the patriarchal order of domination. Nor does it call for a mere truce, which would leave the underlying conditions fostering future conflicts and wars untouched, propelling us into a long awaited apocalypse and a realised fascist desire for a global clash of civilisations. The artist’s gesture is radical in that it extends an invitation to observe how in the current European context the principle and norm of peace have been buried. A white flag fluttering in the wind stands as a historical lament mourning the idea and a politics of peace that has entirely vanished from the political imaginary of the established elites. Not without irony, the concept and politics of peace has too often been confined to the empty gestures of figures such as religious leaders calling for peace and appeasement, epitomised by pacifist moralists that target our bad conscience instead of the deeper causes of war and conflict.

These are all good reasons why today we finally arrive at the point of “re-valuation” of the old, long-lost idea of peace. It is time we embrace peace not as a normative ideal but as a fundamental paradigm and alternative practice in education, politics and economics, a social tie that promotes mutual aid and solidarity that brings an end to all exploitation, domination, and wars and introducing social and climate justice. In other words, the courage required to achieve a lasting peace will far surpass that required to wage any war. The sign of a white flag becomes a wager by Cease to open this permanently contemporary deadlock.

 

Gal Kirn is an assistant professor of sociology of culture at the University of Ljubljana, where he currently leads a research project on the transition and memory culture in the post-Yugoslav context. He published two monographs: Partisan Ruptures (Pluto Press, 2019) and Partisan Counter-Archive (De Gruyter, 2020).