5 May, 2017, at 7 pm
EPEKA Gallery, Maribor

You are invited to the opening of the exhibition project “War and the WWW: Kurds in Syria and Online Networks”, which will take place on Friday, 5 May 2017, at 7 pm at the EPEKA Gallery on Koroški cesta 8 in Maribor.

War and the WWW is a project of online representations of war, specifically the ongoing war in Syria and the Kurdish factions involved in the fighting. In searching for material, the creators of the exhibition mainly used the search words Rojava, YPG, YPJ and PYD – words that refer to the Kurdish area and abbreviations of the largest Kurdish political and military factions in Syria. The project was born as an achievement of letting the web connect, relate, intertwine and weave information. The exhibition is mainly limited to material produced by representatives of Kurdish factions in Syria, published on social networks and official websites.

The images posted on online networks are more about fidelity to certain ideological, political and, ultimately, war aims than about fidelity to representation and faithful description of reality. The realism of these images is thus always already creative – aimed at a specific audience. It can be said to be distinctly documentary. The project focuses on small, overlooked visual stories created with photography, video, symbols and diagrams. It is a unique attempt to see and present current political and war events in one of the most media-exposed parts of the world at the moment – through online image archives. And in this attempt, the project is aided by the fundamental untamedness of the apparatus of photography – there is something about the photographic image that says both more and less than the image-makers want it to say, something about the photograph that speaks both about what is included in them and what is excluded from them. War and the WWW is an exhibition about individuals, history, credibility, and the realism of the image in the age of online social networks, which seeks to focus attention on individuals involved in “history” – in the current political and war turmoil – and on their (in)power to represent their own stories (Jan Babnik).

The exhibition will be on view until 9 June 2017.

Jan Babnik, Iza Pevec and Uroš Abram

With the help of users of.

YPG, YPJ, PYD and Rojava

Co-production.

In its original form, the exhibition was prepared and presented in the framework of the festival “Tolstoy, Seeker of Truth” produced by Cankarjev dom, 11 January – 3 March 2017).

Photo.

The Association EPEKA, Soc. Ent., is supported by the Ministry of Education, Science and Sport – Office for Youth.
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