War is over! If you want it

In 1969, John Lennon and Yoko Ono launched their two-year peace campaign, WAR IS OVER! If you want it. They spread their global campaign against war using the tools and logic of advertising. If war and peace are products, then there is a choice between the two. This shift from fate to freedom of choice forms the starting point for the selection of works that Karin Hanssen created for this exhibition. It is not war itself that takes centre stage, but the mechanisms that make war possible. Shifting perspectives are essential here, whereby a multitude of possibilities, colours and shades of grey are reduced to black-and-white oppositions through visual, rhetorical and political manipulations.

What unfolds in this exhibition is not a linear narrative, but a field of tensions. Between the individual and the masses. Between image and reality. Between revealing and concealing. By isolating images from their context and subsequently creating new meanings, Karin Hanssen demonstrates with precision just how eerily easy it can be to pigeonhole people into boxes of prejudice, categories and stereotypes. (bron: website Gallery Sofie Van de Velde)