All You Need Is Love 

Tatjana Pregl Kobe

In 1967, British photographer David Magnus documented one of the milestones in the history of the Beatles – and telecommunications. The peace anthem “All You Need Is Love”, written by John Lennon specifically for this occasion, was broadcasted from EMI’s music studio on London’s Abbey Road via satellite in the first global television transmission. The song was the United Kingdom’s contribution to the “Our World” show, which was viewed by more than four hundred million people in 25 countries. Activists at that time resisted in various ways, with many loudly protesting through music. John Lennon was one of the few musicians and political activists who presented the ideas of peace in a radical, revolutionary, and unique way. Many of his songs became anthems for anti-war movements. The 1960s and 1970s, remembered for their ideology, political activism, and government repression. Social movements worldwide morphed into diverse organizations with shared ideas: advocating for citizens’ rights, fighting against racism, against censorship, and for freedom of speech and thought. The consequences of the bloody Vietnam War were catastrophic. By 1975, fifty thousand American soldiers and two million Vietnamese had died. During this time, Azad Karim departed from his world to another, where he would remain, while Tomo Križnar hitchhiked around the world, constantly returning. Both students would, in their own ways, change the face of the world over the next few decades, but by Tomo Križnar’s side for the last decade, there was also his wife, Bojana Pivk Križnar.

Azad Karim, a visual artist of two lands, has for decades intertwined experiences of European modernism with Eastern mysticism. Recently, he’s been focusing on the plight of refugees and the horrors faced by people due to wars, poverty, climate change, or all combined. He is also aware that in times of war, the suffering of the world’s cultural heritage is often overlooked. In 2003, when the Americans occupied Baghdad, museums were open for three days, leading to theft and destruction. He was also affected by the destruction of the two Bamiyan Buddha statues in Afghanistan, the looting of the Bardo Museum in Tunisia, and the Egyptian Museum in Cairo during the Arab Spring. Uprisings, occupations, revolutions, disturbances, and extreme ideologies always demand civilian casualties, but works of art, which testify about the past and are the heritage of humanity, are also victims. Only when peace is restored does it become clear what has been lost and what remains. Karim’s works speak of people wandering amidst the ruins, writing on walls about their pain. Therefore, he also portrays walls that have carried various messages with socially and politically engaged themes for millennia, silently witnessing tragic events that have sharply marked human history. He is an artist whose visual images also testify to today’s tragically colored testimonies of people scattered around the world, living in the heart of other cultures. That’s why in 2003, he collaborated with the National Museum in Krakow in preparing the exhibition “Outlook”, the only comprehensive presentation of contemporary Kurdish art by artists scattered across Europe.

The second part of the project – the collaboration of three authors, who each in their own way respond to some issues of the modern world in the exhibition “This World in My Eyes” – also includes photographs by Tomo Križnar and Bojana Pivk Križnar. Since 2013, they have been advocating for the establishment of supranational natural cultural parks to protect the indigenous people in the Nuba Mountains, Blue Nile, and Darfur from the descendants of slave hunters, seeking international support in this regard. Their decade-long collaboration in extreme humanitarian actions, media contributions, lectures, photographic exhibitions, and documentary films focuses on the destruction of a tribe in the Nuba Mountains and its gradual extinction. This area is at war for control of natural resources. Their long-term goal is to protect these people: here are their roots, their history, so they strive for them to develop at their own primitive pace and peace. Since December 2017, they have also been trying to help the most marginalized people – lepers in the Nuba Mountains, who suffer without any medical aid from the international or local community. They are working on establishing the distribution of leprosy drugs even to the most remote places. Among their humanitarian actions, the most moving is the latest film “Decay 2022” (2022), which was in the making for ten years: about leprosy among the Nubas, about the forgotten indigenous people, and their life in the remote Sudanese mountains. But the Sudanese mountains are in a war zone where the indigenous people are surrounded and besieged from all sides! They are at the center of attention of all geostrategic interests – only the world media is not there, because global powers, which control people precisely with the help of the media, don’t like it when we find out what is happening to the most innocent people on Earth from our comfort zones.

Media! Lennon’s timeless peace song “All You Need Is Love” against the war in Vietnam was viewed by nearly half a billion people half a century ago! Picasso’s Guernica, soon after its creation in 1937, became a symbol of the absurdity of war. In the painting, filled with symbolism, there’s also the Minotaur, a monster with a human body and a bull’s head, which is a modern symbol of tyranny, as enacted by Franco, Hitler, Mussolini… How to resist today’s war horrors, which flare up again and again? The battle of superpowers for control over the Arctic, the role of America on the world map, China’s entry into the international scene, the significance of Africa in today’s world, and the increasingly threatening climate crisis? How drastically should modern media depict the horrors that lepers in today’s world experience for the world to hear them? To be moved by them. To be touched by them. Is it enough to show their disease-destroyed faces from which the kindness of eyes shines? When the effects of the disease in a photo or film are so drastic that they repel, they don’t evoke pity, just revulsion. Media – these need a master. How else to reach hearts than through empathy?
 

For Marx, music was a “mirror of reality,” Nietzsche understood it as the “word of truth.” If art, of any kind, is committed to truth, let this truth touch all the remnants of humanity that we still carry within us with piety, solidarity, and compassion. The philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote in his “Essay on the Origin of Languages” (Krtina, 1999, p. 30): “Let us then investigate the origin of various arts or observe the first natures; in both cases, we see that from the beginning, everything relates to the means of survival.” If art in this context – such as paintings, installations, photographs, videos, and documentary films by Azad Karim, Tomo Križnar, and Bojana Pivk Križnar – can change the world and stealthily instill knowledge, awareness, and hope into hearts, then the exhibition “This World in My Eyes” has also achieved its purpose.