“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 conceptual 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 human conflict, my aim is to provoke reflection on the past, present and importantly, the future.
By interweaving the past with the present, crucially, this is an exhibition with 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 killed in war, others will have grieved that loss. Many survivors of war will endure a lifetime of mental health issues, while innumerable families of injured combatants will become the unwitting carers to someone living with a war’s legacy. Recovering The Past asserts that all of these people are victims of war, yet there are no memorials to acknowledge their suffering. Their plight has been all but forgotten.
In attributing victim status to every person impacted by war, I effectively eliminate gender imbalance that otherwise dominates past conflict commemorations.
‘My husband [was] a long sufferer from his war injuries…& was nursed…day and night in our own little home here by myself.’
This stand-alone conceptual exhibition simultaneously employs twenty-five, striking montage images and historic personal memoirs; two independent but crucial elements, which work hand-in-hand to convey a troubling situation.
Recovering The Past’s imagery brings to the viewer’s attention a physical legacy of all conflicts, that of 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.
Taking a novel approach to explore the less appreciated societal impacts of war, this multi-layered exhibition combines my own photographs taken on location in Flanders with archival imagery and poignant historic memoirs.
Recovering The Past has an impressive history of international public display, with over 182,000 visitors to date. First displayed at the United Nations, Geneva in 2015, this exhibition later 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
Recovering The Past is based on the experience of The Great War. A catastrophic human tragedy of the early 20th century, the war brought an industrial scale of manufacturing to the field of human conflict. Over 10 million service personnel died in the Great War, more than 50 million more survived it, whilst estimates suggest that 20-25% of all ammunition fired during the four years of hostilities did not explode. Two barely believable facts whose legacies persisted for decades after the Armistice, one of which will persist for many more years to come.
In unifying the ongoing efforts of the Belgian armed forces with memoirs of those impacted by the war a century ago, I have created a thought-provoking exhibition that combines the past with the present.
The immense suffering of those whose voices from the past appear in the exhibition text, present a sobering testimony, yet in reality, their words are forever prescient. Recovering The Past raises 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, he was one of many millions of the war’s survivors who endured what is now known as Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. The Great War took a terrible toll on the post-war world, its legacies were to impact people from nations the world over. Yet those same legacies are true of every war, and are 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
Recovering The Past was produced through an unprecedented collaboration of myself and DOVO-SEDEE, the Belgian Army bomb-disposal team. Now in their second century of continuous operations in Flanders, for the personnel of this specialist military unit, their work will take many more years to complete.
“I make several hundred collections of shells from the Flanders region each year…”
Sobering words aren’t they; spoken by a serving member of the Belgian Army’s bomb-disposal team, he is just one of many personnel who have served in this unit since its creation in 1920, and one of the many thousands of men and women of similar teams which now operate across the world 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 is proud to raise 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.
Weaving two parallel narratives, the exhibition’s imagery take 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. Simultaneously, the imagery compresses a century of intervening time by juxtaposing members of the bomb disposal team with historic images of Australian soldiers who served in Flanders during the Great War. The artworks present a compelling, visual expression of post-conflict and achievement and reconciliation. Do the images also reveal a team effort across time? That’s for you, the viewer, to decide.
The project does not feature scenes of war; this is not a project about a war itself, but one of people impacted by it. 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.
This Exhibition Matters
I believe in this exhibition; more than just a series of photographs with supporting text, this multi-layered conceptual work exists to challenge its viewer into engaging with the complex legacies of war. The century-old mental-health issues revealed through the poignant memoirs of the men and women depicted throughout the exhibition, will strike a contemporary chord for many in the significant mental-health challenges confronting society today.
“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.”
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 since, those of this moment, and those yet to come.
For as long as war exists, the message conveyed in Recovering The Past will remain forever relevant.
The project does not feature scenes of war; this is not a project about a war itself, but one of people impacted by it. 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.
History
Exhibited at twenty-seven venues across four nations, and viewed by more than 180,000 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 impacts of war in a post-conflict world.