Pedagogies of War
March 3–June 21, 2026
Curated by Chus Martínez.
At a moment when war is omnipresent yet increasingly mediated through screens, algorithmic systems, and remote technologies that separate action from consequence, TBA21 presents Pedagogies of War, an exhibition by Ukrainian artists Roman Khimei and Yarema Malashchuk at the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza. Consistent with TBA21’s long-standing conviction that artists help sustain peace on the horizon of imagination, the exhibition reflects on how violence reshapes perception, behavior, and collective life long before it is named, explained, or understood.
War is not framed here as a singular historical event, nor as a spectacle to be consumed. Instead, Pedagogies of War considers war as a system of training, one that quietly reorganizes attention, disciplines bodies, and alters the texture of everyday reality. In the words of Chus Martínez: “The exhibition takes its cue from a paradox articulated by Bertolt Brecht, who distinguished between Erlebnis—immediate, immersive lived experience—and Erfahrung, experience that is processed, reflected upon, and transformed into knowledge. For Brecht, art does not transmit lived experience directly; it converts experience into a form of understanding. What kind of knowledge, then, can art produce about war? One possible answer, explored throughout this exhibition, is that war radically transforms everything while allowing much to remain disturbingly familiar.”
Across its initiatives, TBA21 understands peace as something continuously produced—or eroded—through social relations, institutions, technologies, images, and ecologies. Pedagogies of War extends this inquiry by focusing on how war teaches without instruction: through exposure, repetition, discipline, and proximity. Rather than moral lessons or ethical awakenings, war generates forms of knowledge that emerge only under extreme conditions—ways of watching, waiting, complying, adapting, and enduring that are learned without language.
The exhibition brings together four video installations by Roman Khimei and Yarema Malashchuk, whose practice has consistently examined how life persists and is reshaped under conditions of structural violence. Working at the intersection of cinema, performance, and social observation, the artists move beyond documentary modes, often deploying fiction to examine how reality itself becomes staged, absorbed, and internalized during war. Their work traces how violence distorts the real, how fiction infiltrates everyday life, and how individuals and groups rehearse new behaviors in response—sometimes consciously, often involuntarily.
Central to Khimei and Malashchuk’s practice is an understanding of learning as an embodied process. Knowledge circulates not through explanation but through imitation, physical proximity, and exposure. Bodies learn from other bodies; machines are trained to mimic animal movement; witnesses observe without intervening. Silence, duration, and tension structure the artists’ works, producing a dramaturgy in which meaning emerges through time and attention rather than narrative resolution or catharsis. Skeptical of dramatic climax and emotional closure, the artists foreground minimal plots and everyday situations as a way to expose contingency, awkwardness, and the limits of identification.
The exhibition unfolds as a sequence of perceptual environments that trace how war reorganizes vision, memory, and bodily presence. It opens with The Wanderer (2022), part of the TBA21 Collection and produced shortly after the beginning of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Set across five scenarios in the Carpathian Mountains, Malashchuk and Khimei stage the bodies of fallen Russian occupiers—using their own bodies as stand-ins—within natural landscapes shaped by occupation. Referencing Caspar David Friedrich’s Wanderer above the Sea of Fog and the Ukrainian art-historical work If I Were a German (1994) by the Fast Reaction Group, the film interrogates Western ways of seeing the war while dismantling the romantic image of death as sublime. By placing the fallen soldiers within this visual lineage, the work exposes landscape as a site of domination and points to the Russian army as a contemporary colonizing force, confronting the civilizational rupture war inscribed into culture and territory alike.
This inquiry continues in Open World (2025), recently presented at the 36th Ljubljana Biennale of Graphic Arts. The work follows a young Ukrainian boy displaced by war as he revisits his neighborhood under constant shelling, mediated through a military robotic dog repurposed as a tool of memory and connection. Oscillating between weapon and companion, the robotic device becomes a mediator of presence and absence, revealing how technology reshapes exile, return, and emotional attachment. Here, war’s infrastructures are neither rejected nor neutralized; they are reconfigured to expose their psychological and affective consequences.
In You Shouldn’t Have to See This (2024), a six-channel, silent installation depicting sleeping Ukrainian children who were forcibly taken to Russia and later returned, the artists confront the uneasy threshold between witnessing and voyeurism. The work places viewers before images that function simultaneously as evidence of atrocity and as intimate, vulnerable scenes that resist spectacle. By withholding sound and dramatic cues, the installation asks what it means to look at images of violence that do not announce themselves as such- and how attention itself becomes an ethical terrain.
The exhibition culminates in We Didn’t Start this War (2026), a new commission produced for the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza. Here, the banality of everyday life is suspended and displaced by an imagination shaped by the constant proximity of violence. The work inhabits the fragile, almost imperceptible threshold where war does not erupt yet never fully recedes, foregrounding how repetition, responsibility, and agency circulate within the ongoing experience of conflict.
Taken together, these works show how war is learned before it is understood—absorbed through everyday rhythms, rules, and demands. Pedagogies of War rejects spectacle and grand mythologies, instead asserting art’s ability to sustain collective reflection at a moment when violence risks becoming routine. By privileging embodied experience over representation and engaging the social and life sciences alongside cinematic language, the exhibition reinforces art’s role in fostering shared political spaces—where people appear as equals and peace remains thinkable as a lived, collective practice.
