“The Best Exhibition I Have Ever Seen”
The impacts of war are global, timeless and long lasting. For millions of war survivors, the long-term social and physical legacies war creates will only begin once the conflict itself has ended.
Recovering The Past is a ground-breaking photographic exhibition in which I develop a unique narrative to explore the impact of the legacies of war on societies. Moving away from convention, Recovering The Past is most emphatically not an exhibition of war itself, but rather of people impacted by it. By laying bare the long-term social and physical consequences of war, my aim is to provoke reflection on the past, present and importantly, the future.
By interweaving the past with the present, my exhibition is a message to our future selves. With human-conflict an ever-present reality, the stories that Recovering The Past tells are not historical relics, but sobering templates of all wars to come.
War’s dead are rightly commemorated, but is it right that its survivors are rarely acknowledged? Recovering the Past addresses that imbalance and extends the victim status beyond those who are killed in a war to those who are injured or bereaved by it.
For every person that has lost life to a war, there will be one or more who will be grieving their loss. Recovering The Past asserts that they are themselves victims of war. In attributing victim status to every person impacted by war, I effectively eliminate gender imbalance that otherwise dominates past conflict commemorations.
The exhibition consists of twenty-five striking images that bring to the viewer’s attention a physical legacy of all conflicts – unexploded ammunition. Each photomontage was produced in full co-operation with the Belgian armed forces, for whom the ongoing recovery of unexploded First World War shells from the former battlefields of Flanders is a daily reality.
Internationally exhibited, and with over 200,000 visitors to date, this is a multi-layered photographic project which takes a novel approach to explore societal impacts of war. It combines my own photographs taken on location in Flanders with archival imagery and historic poignant personal memoirs.
Recovering The Past has an impressive history of public display. Having been displayed at the United Nations in Geneva in 2015, this exhibition was subsequently featured as part of Belgium’s centenary commemorations of the Great War. Since then, over a period of 7 years, it has been on continuous tour of nearly 30 galleries in Australia, including a 6-month display at Melbourne’s nationally significant Shrine of Remembrance.
A compelling, visual exploration of post-conflict achievement and reconciliation, Recovering The Past brings the past and present together through a series of striking montage images.
The Great War: the foundation of the project
The men who died during the Great War are remembered through many thousands of dedicated cemeteries and memorials. But a very different story exists for its embattled survivors: war-widows, orphans, mothers who grieved for lost sons and those who lost their friends and relatives. With no such commemorative sites for the millions of these men, women and children who endured great personal suffering in the years after the Armistice, their plight has been all but forgotten.
In Recovering The Past, I raise the profile of these people, and by giving them a long overdue and much deserved voice, I make them ambassadors to our future.
In 1974 – more than fifty years after the Armistice – Australian First World War veteran Jim McPhee said:
“We thought we managed alright, kept the awful things out of our minds, but now I’m an old man they come out from where I hid them. Every night.”
McPhee was far from alone. The Great War took a terrible toll, with its aftermath impacting nations the world over. The war’s consequences were not restricted to its returning veterans – for whom long-term mental health issues and suicide were to become common place – but also to the millions of men, women and children whose loved ones were destined never to return.
The same legacy is true of every war since and every war yet to come. This generally unrecognised legacy is universal across national boundaries, cultures, religions and political systems.
Amputee servicemen of the Great War. Largely forgotten, there is no dedicated memorial to war’s survivors.
DOVO-SEDEE: responding to a physical legacy of war
By visually combining the past and the present, Recovering The Past warns of the enduring trauma of war, any war. It was produced through an unprecedented collaboration with the Belgian Army bomb-disposal team. It weaves two parallel narratives. First, it takes the viewer on a pictorial journey through the complex and high-risk operation to recover and destroy century-old, unexploded ammunition from the former battlefields of Flanders. Second, it collapses the time between the now and then by juxtaposing members of the bomb disposal team at work with historic images of Australian soldiers who served in Flanders during the Great War.
“I make several hundred collections of shells from the Flanders region each year…”
These are sobering words from a serving member of the Belgian Army’s bomb-disposal team. He is one of the thousands of personnel who have served in this unit since its creation in 1920; many such teams operate worldwide on a daily basis.
Unexploded munitions from past conflicts will collectively total in the hundreds of millions. This long-term physical consequence of war continues to claim innocent victims every year. The humanitarian mission carried out by bomb-disposal engineers is essential but despite the obvious dangers, it is also largely unseen. Recovering The Past raises the profile of their work.
A DOVO-SEDEE team recover a hoard of 148 unfired shells from a field in West Flanders.
Limited edition prints
Limited-edition, archival-quality prints from this exhibition are available for purchase in three distinct sizes. Each print will feature the image name, its unique edition number and the artist’s signature.
Ian Alderman, Artist, and creator of Recovering The Past
The Exhibition's Imagery: Pointing To A Likely Future
A photograph is a record of a past event. Recovering The Past deliberately challenges this convention, its imagery points its viewers firmly towards the future.
The exhibition depicts two distinct groups of men with origins a century apart, but who are united through a tragic conflict; creating a striking and sensitive message of post-conflict achievement and resolution. Do the images reveal a team effort across time? That’s for you, the viewer, to decide.
“The most harrowing, touching explanation of what war does that I think I’ve ever viewed. It brought tears to my eyes & shivers down my spine. Just fantastic.”
The project does not feature any scenes of war; this is not a project about a war. It has always been my intention to look beyond, and to the devastating and enduring consequences of war.This is a story about those left behind, about those who are little appreciated. It is a story relevant to everyone and everyone needs to engage with it.
Despite the intervening century of time between the depicted men, all are treated as equals. Here, equality is evident through the mirroring of a simple administrative task.
This Exhibition Matters
Unexploded ammunition and conflict-induced human trauma are universal legacies of all wars. Hundreds of wars have been fought since the Armistice of 1918, each creating comparable legacies for successive generations to deal with. This is true of all wars going on now and all wars yet to come.
For as long as war exists, the message I convey in Recovering The Past will remain forever relevant
History
Exhibited at twenty-seven venues across four nations, and viewed by more than 200,000 people, Recovering The Past’s narrative is one of timeless significance.
Mission
With its narrative of global relevance, artist Ian Alderman is striving to bring this human-focused exhibition to ever more international audiences.
Vision
That this exhibition will contribute to our broader understanding of the post-conflict world.