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Pablo Picasso’s Guernica (1937) is a powerful painting about the suffering caused by war. It was inspired by the bombing of the town of Guernica during the Spanish Civil War when on the 26th of April 1937 the town of Guernica was razed to the ground by German-Nazi air-raids. Instead of showing a realistic scene, Picasso uses distorted figures, sharp angles, and a black-and-white palette to express pain, fear, and chaos. Humans, animals, and objects are broken and twisted, reflecting the destruction and confusion caused by violence. The painting is a universal symbol of the horrors of war. Figures like the screaming horse, the grieving mother with her child, and the fallen soldier show how war destroys lives and innocence. Guernica is not just about one event—it is about human suffering and the impact of violence everywhere. Through its dramatic and abstract style, it communicates emotion and tragedy more than literal details, making it a timeless statement against war.
The project I undertook was to re-imagine Guernica, and I did so to put it in a modern context. The horrors of war still continue today and the main difference between the situation in the 1930s and today is that war is largely shaped by the use of technology, such as computers. Because of computer technology, war is not only limited to the physical world but has also expanded into a digital world. Although it still requires physical action to cause harm, computer technology has empowered systems of harm to be ubiquitous, which multiplies the effectiveness of the systems in place to cause physical harm, and therefore gives these systems a reach that covers almost any location on Earth. Further, computer technology causes not only physical harm but can also cause deep psychological harm, which may lead to physical harm or distress.
Therefore, to reflect the present-day situation of harm caused by computer technology—which results in the same kind of destructive state that Picasso originally illustrated in Guernica—I re-imagined the work by adding physical computer components. I used computer parts such as keyboards, microchips, and wires across a recreated version of Guernica, making the original work relevant to the present-day destruction caused by warfare empowered by computer technology.
Guernica Re-Imagined — India Ink on Paper & Electronics — 12 feet x 5 feet — 2011
