Jenny Holzer
There Was A War
How can we create an experience to bring an interview to life?
-
As a part of her 40-year retrospective at the Guggenheim Bilbao, Jenny Holzer wanted to create a piece to address the experiences of Syrian Civil War refugees.
-
Sitara Systems worked with Hypersonic Design and Jenny Holzer Studio to create a kinetic sculpture that showcased statements from 131 eyewitness accounts from Syrian refugees, including military defectors and intelligence agents.
-
The sculpture is a four-sided LED sign on a cable system that suspends it from the Guggenheim Bilbao’s chimney. The sculpture descends into the exhibition hall floor like a bomb, before stopping just above the ground and then lighting up to show phrases from Jenny Holzer’s interviews with refugees.
There Was A War
In 2019, the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao presented a 40-year retrospective of the work of Jenny Holzer. For this exhibition, Jenny Holzer not only provided a body of her previous work, but was also commissioned to produce three new works that explored contemporary issues.
There Was A War is one of these three works. It is a four-sided vertical LED sign that swings from a robotic assembly suspended from the gallery’s ceiling. For this work, Holzer sought out information on Syria’s ongoing civil war, its devastating humanitarian consequences, and the international refugee crisis—the documents used by the artist include 131 individual eyewitness accounts collected between 2011 and 2016 by the organizations Human Rights Watch and Save the Children. Interviews with civilian protesters arrested, detained, and tortured by the Assad regime and with defectors from the Syrian military and intelligence agencies offer insight into the unfulfilled promise of Syria’s Arab Spring. Statements from Syrian children and their parents give voice to the many families who have fled their homes over the past eight years and now struggle with daunting challenges.
Sitara Systems was asked to collaborate with Hypersonic Design to create a kinetic sculpture that could communicate the terrifying experiences of the Syrian Civil War with Holzer’s text works. Together, they designed a kinetic sculpture that dropped like a bomb from multiple stories above the hall, before stopping only a foot above the ground, and showering visitors with the glow of Holzer’s words.
