War against War/War or Peace
Monica Oppen, Peter Lyssiotis,
Ant Press, Masterthief, 2025
This work negotiates the ongoing struggle for peace. It faces the overwhelming power of war. It doesn’t take sides— exposes war as a business, always seeks humanity, seeks to expose the cruelty, the suffering.
The format is double facing. The two series of images are interwoven, in dialogue. The two sequences come together to make the one— agitprop, altered images, tough declarations combine with photographs snapping protests for peace from the street, graffiti, posters, murals, from the web, docos, newsletters… ?
The title of the work salutes two peace activists and pacifists Australian Noel Counihan and German Ernst Friedrich. At the books core are the words from ancient Sufi poet Rumi:
Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,
There is a field. I’ll meet you there.
We want Peace not War
Monica Oppen, Ant Press, 2025
This book brings together texts of some great thinkers about peace and war; Arundhati Roy, Albert Camus, Haile Selassie I, Dalai Lama XIV and Assata Shakur. The intention is to make readers feel uncomfortable, to stop slippage into peace clichés and excuses for war.
The pages used for this book were proof sheets from the Peace volumes. It was made as a prototype binding (using a hinged structure) for those Peace volumes but it stands as a work in its own right. The focus in the work has shifted. The botanical drawings are all of well known weeds plants which sprout readily disturbed ground; dandelion (Taraxacum officinale), stinging nettle (Urtica dioica), plantain (Plantago lanceolata), and the common poppy (Papaver rhoeas). The plants offer the express the possibility of healing.
