Photo exhibition: War without War, Meinrad Schade
Venue details: Fotostiftung Schweiz, Grüzenstrasse 45, CH-8400 Winterthur (Zürich), Tel. +41 52 234 10 30 | Official Website | Event date: from 07-03-2015 to 17-05-2015 | Opening hours: Daily 11 a.m. to 6 p.m., Wednesday 11 am to 8 pm, closed on Mondays.
Meinrad Schade is not a war photographer in the classical sense. He does not take photographs at the hotspots of military conflicts so as to supply the sensationalist press with images of violence.
Documenting the ongoing violence of wars around the globe and their aftermaths is an important topic in photojournalism. But what is there to document, when war is over? What can be pictured when acts of visible violence have finished? The Swiss photographer Meinrad Schade took up this challenge. For more then ten years he worked on his long-term project “Before, alongside and after the war” in parts of today’s Russia and of the states of the former Soviet Union, such as the republics of Chechnya and Ingushetia, Kazakhstan, Nagorno-Karabakh and the Ukraine. Currently he is continuing his project in Israel and Palestine.
Together with the curator Martin Gasser he set up the exhibition “War without War” which is currently displayed at the Fotostiftung Schweiz in Winterthur. In six chapters such as “Isolated” or “Displaced” he allows a deep photographic insight into the human experience of war. Each chapter of the exhibition starts with an introductory text and the images themselves are all accompanied by extensive captions in order to be able to contextualize them. Through his eyes we see a memorial site of the Second World War in Kiev, a former nuclear weapons test site Kazakhstan or the day life Nagorno-Karabakh. But the exhibition doesn’t stop in the former Soviet Union and includes as well pictures from the Eurosatory weapons trade fair in Paris or War & Peace Show in Beltring, England.
