You must register by 5pm on October 28, 2024 to attend this event.

Please join the Harriman Institute for the opening reception of the exhibit Children of the War.

Children of the War is organized around the publication of a new artist book by Marina Tëmkina and Michel Gérard titled Boys Fight. The text for this publication originated in 2014 in reaction to Russia’s initial invasion into Ukraine and was completed amid anxiety about the presidential election in the United States. The texts are written in the language of absurdity grounded in a feminist critique of the persistent presence of war. Gérard’s drawings taken from the French dictionary Petit Larousse, published in Paris in 1942 during the Nazi Occupation, appear alongside Tëmkina’s texts. The artist was a small child then and it was encouraging for him to look at the images of athletes playing traditional male sports. In imagery of fighting cavemen, fragmented dinosaurs, sportsmen, and combative games, Gérard contends with the dissonance between play and violence, strength and growth, and word and image. These original drawings are presented at the Harriman Institute for the first time.

This exhibition focuses on the traumatic consequences of war for children’s psyches. What images and feelings does our conscience carry throughout life? Why do we, the children of the war and post-war period baby boomers, return to this experience of the family and collective traumas again and again? The exhibition includes Tëmkina’s cycle of twelve texts “Children Who Starve” about the psychological self-negation as a result of food deprivation that children of the war experience.

The exhibit is co-organized with the Russian American Cultural Center.