Security Measures
“Throughout history, conflicts have been documented, investigated, challenged and responded to by artists. From Goya’s searing Disasters of War etchings of the Napoleonic Wars to the harrowing and disillusioned First World War works of David Bomberg, Laura Knight’s documenting of female experience of the Second World War, and more recently the brutal and confrontational works of Peter Howson produced in Bosnia, artists have managed to create work that both critiques and reflects the political circumstances of the conflicts in context. The work of photographic artist Edmund Clark, who is the subject of a major new exhibition at the Imperial War Museum in London, constitutes just such an undertaking, offering one of the most comprehensive and challenging engagements with the politics and realities of war in the era of the so-called “Global War on Terror.””