re-Imagined: Reflections on Peace

A synonym for peace is tranquility, yet we are hard-pressed to find such calm in the post-conflict societies struggling in the wake of war. Peace is universally lauded as one of humankind’s highest achievements, yet our cities are filled with statues of warriors cast in bronze, and we continue to define valor as bravery in war; shouldn’t it also be defined as the courage to make peace?  

As long as we celebrate warriors more than peacemakers and emphasize our differences rather than humbly seeking our commonalities, peace will be framed in the context of war, as an absence of something rather than a presence.  

Once a war starts and people are hemmed in by its violence, they summon the elusive ideal and try to imagine peace. When battlefield prowess and political manipulation are not enough to achieve peace through victory, when we are on our knees or have run out of ideas, we summon our best and brightest to negotiate an end. 

But the reality of peace is flawed. The rewards of peace are elusive for the men and women who live in the post-conflict societies of our time. Why is it so difficult to make a good peace when it is so easy to imagine? re-Imagined: Reflections on Peace begins with that question. 

The exhibition revisits a project that The VII Foundation first published in 2020 and re-examines it through the prism of today’s wars. We bring together seminal works by leading authors, politicians, academics, and peace negotiators to examine peace not as an event, but as a fragile and contested process, and an achievable goal. 

The project focuses on societies marred by conflict and living in the shadows of its aftermath. It asks what worked, and what didn’t, so that we can learn from those experiences and make better peace. We examine the role of transitional justice, truth and reconciliation, the significance of women in the peace process, and other conditions required to successfully negotiate and implement peace. We consider the generational burden carried by survivors and the consequences of the trauma inherited by their children; we explore the politics and power of memory and the burden of history; and we look at the strength of the individual spirit in carving a path forward by refusing to let the past determine their future. 

New work from Ukraine, Gaza, Myanmar, and Iran places ongoing violence beside histories of post-conflict life, collapsing the distance between past and present, emergency and aftermath. Gaza speaks of a genocide and resilience under siege. Myanmar reveals the collapse of the political process and the human cost of prolonged civil war. Iran exposes the intimate relationship between state power, repression, resistance, revenge and the complex global effects of the conflict in the Persian Gulf, a conflict now felt everywhere. 

The exhibition offers no easy consolation. It does not present peace as innocence, harmony, or forgetting. It asks instead how peace is built: through courage, accountability, imagination, negotiation, and the small daily acts that insist on human dignity. 

At a time when war and violence are being normalised, re–Imagined argues that peace must be understood as something more than either an ideal or the absence of something. It is a basic human right. It is a messy, complex state that constantly needs to be imagined and reimagined, and it requires immense courage and sacrifice to resist the corrosive forces that continually threaten to erase it. 

Find out more about the Imagine project here. 

Press contact:
Amber Maitland, Director of Communications
[email protected]