Blooming in Arms, Museum of Modern Art, Oxford

Heri Dono's installation at the Museum of Modern Art, Oxford is a chilling reminder of the realities of war, but also the transformative nature of war.

It occupies one gallery in Oxford’s Museum of Modern Art and when you enter, the space is lit with only red lights. Camouflage netting hangs from the ceiling and the room is filled with a selection of hanging human-like figures made from camouflage netting, prosthetic limbs and elements of militaria.

These are a horrific concoction of humanity and terror, personifying war in the invasive presence of gigantic, ugly amorphous creatures that seem literally the stuff of nightmares, whether that's for the civilian population or the soldiers themselves.

One thinks of landmines and their ability to mutilate. Then there is the horrific power of war to change the landscapes it permeates, turning fields that grow the crops for life into battlefields of death and destruction.

In the center of the room is a brick construction filled with soil. It is not clear whether this is a grave or a monument, but its smell permeates the gallery, adding to the unreal and unpleasant atmosphere generated from the monochromatic lighting and the discarded, mouldy smell of the camouflage netting.

Part of the exhibition is a persistent, muffled radio transmission, hinting at the voices of State propaganda, perhaps the sound of the parents of the nation telling its children that war is necessary; destruction and terror are what we must face almost in the way we're told we have to go to school.

With the gallery attendants also wearing military uniforms it's a horribly effective way to encapsulate war, and made all the stranger because over here in Western Europe the struggles of territories like Indonesia are not simple foreign wars. The guilt of colonialism is never far away.

But even without in-depth understanding of any of the politics, the lighting, the sound, the smell and spectacle of the prosthetic limbs and the size of the horrific statues are so unwelcoming that the urge to escape is high, and in that gesture we are reminded that we can walk away from this. 

Just outside of the gallery the shops and the comforts of life in our own country that isn't suffering from war. We should be glad of that.

But if you have time to visit the exhibition, there is ample food for thought about how lucky we are to live in peace and the mystery of why war is ever seen as any kind of solution.

Review by Francis Bookwood. 

Blooming in Arms by Heri Dono runs from 14th of January to 11th of February, 1996 at the Museum of Modern Art in Pembroke Street, Oxford.