“We are not hardwired for war. We need to understand it so we can end it.” This is the message the German artist and social activist Bettina WitteVeen aims to deliver with her photographic installation in the abandoned pre-Civil War hospital in the Brooklyn Navy Yard. When We Were Soldiers… once and young opens to the public on Saturday 19 September (until 24 October), allowing the public access to the site for the first time in decades.
WitteVeen and her assistants have poured through military archives to find images of war that she has rephotographed and manipulated to “quiet” the picture. The photographs showing soldiers missing limbs, women and civilians caught in the crossfire, and fields upon fields of poppies are then printed large and arranged in groups to create a patchwork of visual “poems” about the physical and psychological effects of warfare.
On the first floor, installed in patient’s rooms, the displays focus on battlefield injuries, as well as a chilling premonition of the shape of war in the future—drones, robots and satellite surveillance. Downstairs, the installations take a more conceptual turn. In a stark white room, a young girl smiles while a small medical table below holds a book that tells her story as the victim of rape during the First World War. Black crosses bar the doors to some of the cells, often used to secure patients suffering from psychological problems. But a moment of calm respite from all this suffering can be found in a makeshift chapel, inspired by Berlin’s Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gedächtniskirche, which was bombed during the Second World War but rebuilt in the 1960s with the ruins left intact.
The free exhibition is installed over two floors of the derelict hospital building, which was built in 1838 and housed injured American soldiers from the Civil War until the Second World War. The crumbling site was chosen by WitteVeen to mirror the broken bodies and shattered psyches of many returning from war. A ramp was specially built to allow disabled veterans access to the exhibition.
The Brooklyn Navy Hospital is the centrepiece of a planned Media Campus to be developed in cooperation with the owner of Steiner Studios, the television and film production complex next door. Doug Steiner is helping to fund the restoration of the historic building, with the goal of finding a techie anchor tenant like Google or Apple, so this one-off exhibition could be the public’s only chance to see inside the antebellum building.
For more info and to reserve a ticket to the exhibition: http://www.bettinawitteveen.com
