When war ends, loss begins. The past floods in, images of loved ones lost, laughter shared, late-night conversations, all come rushing back in, as if no time has passed at all, as if they happened only moments ago.
When war ends, loss takes form. News headlines would focus on numbers of victims, the missing, the wreckage of streets and homes, the cost of rebuilding. But these figures, though necessary, would fail to capture the full shape of loss. Beyond the physical destruction, war unravels social norms, breaks relationships and shatters the inner worlds of the survivors. Loss becomes more than just absence, it transforms into a quiet, pervasive defeat that is felt in the rubble outside and the emptiness within.
When war ends, loss settles in. In the face of tragedy, the human mind seeks meaning through stories, symbols and shared experiences. When everything else is stripped away, literature, art and culture become tools through which we attempt to understand what was lost, what remains, and what might still be. Loss manifests itself in many forms in art, each capturing a different facet of human experience.
Horror, landscape, exile, trauma and shame are five themes that often emerge in the aftermath. These themes aren’t mutually exclusive, many artworks dealing with loss could fall into more than one category, reflecting the layered nature of this loss.
Horror
War is not only lived, it imprints itself on landscapes, bodies and memories. After the Holocaust, Theodor Adorno questioned whether poetry could exist in the wake of such immense suffering. “To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbarism,” he declared, confronting the magnitude of horror and the overwhelming responsibility it imposes on the artist.
This agonising reflection lies at the heart of the survivors´ struggle, whether those who directly experienced the violence of war or those who witnessed its impact from a distance. Whether on the battlefield or through the cold glow of a screen, anyone who bears witness to such horrors, becomes, in some way or another, a survivor of it, and irreversibly shaped by its presence.
Maisara Baroud’s “I’m Still Alive” series gives visual form to the horror that is war. His black-white illustrations, deeply rooted in his personal experience of living through the war in Gaza.
Baroud’s figures, which are often distorted, fragmented, and trapped in suffocating, liminal spaces, seem suspended on the threshold between life and death, numbness and raw terror. The horror he conveys in this disfigurement of both body and soul carries a haunting presence, probing the inaction that allowed the machinery of death to keep turning, keep devouring lives like shattered glass.
View this post on Instagram
Bayan Abu Nahla’s “War Portraits” reflect a similarly unsettling reality, focusing on how the horror of war imprints itself onto the body. In her portraits, faces are etched with grief, their eyes heavy with agony. “Our eyes are unlike any others,” she writes in an instagram post, “They are open windows to horror.”
For Abu Nahla, these faces don’t only depict suffering, they embody it. They speak of pure horror: the death of loved ones, the erasure of everything once held dear, and the violence that strips away the soul’s layers, exposing raw, unfiltered pain.
Reflecting on her work, Abu Nahla explains: “My art is melancholic, sorrowful, and pointed. It takes on the function of art in catharsis by expressing the despondency planted within us by a cruel life.”
View this post on Instagram
Landscape
War doesn’t just claim lives, it transforms the land itself, leaving scars that persist long after the violence subsides. The landscape becomes a testament to destruction, a witness to the remnants of countless lives once lived.
Tammam Azzam explores this theme in “The Syrian Museum” (2013) where he overlays Syria’s war-torn landscapes with iconic artworks from the history of Western art. He superimposed Gustav Klimt’s The Kiss against a backdrop of bombed-out buildings, starkly mixing love and tenderness with ugliness of ruin.
View this post on Instagram
The cruel irony in Azzam’s use of masterpieces by Da Vinci, Matisse and others is a stark reminder that the same humanity capable of creating sublime art is also capable of unimaginable destruction.
Another powerful reflection on the lingering scars of war is “Monument to the Living” (2001-8), a Marwan Rechmaoui’s miniature replica of Beirut’s infamous Murr Tower. Once a sniper post, a prison and arms depot during Lebanon’s Civil War, the unfinished thirty-four-story office building remains standing, a skeleton monument to a violent past.
Deemed structurally unfit for rehabilitation, and too costly to demolish, the tower serves as an “unadorned testament, both to the arbitrary tyranny of the war, and to the inanity of the social, sectarian, and urban constituencies engendered by the failing post-war order.”
In 2022, an architect reimagined this same tower as a cemetery turning “Murr” into “La Mort” (برج المُر/برج الموت,), reclaiming a site of violence and transforming it into a final resting place for the dead, highlighting once again the complicated set of interactions between war, death and memory in modern urban spaces.
In these works, landscapes are not only spaces but also living records of the legacy of war. The land in these works is hardly a neutral backdrop but an active participant in post-war narratives. It bears the weight of destruction, the scars of trauma in its ruins, in its walls and in the people who inhabit them.
Exile
The memories of war often endure in the body and heart long after the physical wounds have healed. Among the deepest of these wounds is the loss of home –whether forced or chosen, the act of leaving one’s place of origin is such a haunting experience for survivors. Mona Hatoum’s “Suspended” (2011) captures this ever-present theme of loss.
Mona Hatoum’s installations also explore gender, race & politics, working in a variety of media including scaled-up household objects, transforming them into foreign, threatening, dangerous things. pic.twitter.com/wPtjaUGsdy
— Bedford School Art (@Bedford_Arts) September 28, 2020
The installation features a room filled with wooden swings, each engraved with street maps of capital cities, hanging obliquely, moving even when untouched, mirroring the relentless dislocation of people, places and memories. The swings’ unsettling movement becomes a metaphor of the lives of those who have been displaced, always in motion, always longing for a home that has been uprooted, no longer exists or can never be reclaimed.
This exploration of displacement links back to Doris Salcedo’s “Shibboleth” (2007-8), where a giant crack splits the floor of London’s Tate Modern, symbolising the rupture caused by war and separation. The term “Shibboleth,” a word used to distinguish people who belong from those who do not, highlights the way in which invisible borders (be social, political or cultural) exile people from belonging.
Like Hatoum’s swings, Salcedo’s crack represents more than a division of space; it becomes a symbol of the dislocation felt by those who have lost everything–their homes, their communities and their sense of self.
For war survivors, life is forever divided into a before and an after, separated by an unbridgeable rift in both space and soul. For those displaced by war, the loss is of not only a home, but of a self that existed within. The rupture created by displacement, like Salcedo’s “Shibboleth” is a wound that remains visible, never fully healed, even when covered up – Tate Modern filled the crack, but a scarred floor remained. “This is a remarkable symbol of the possibility of healing through figurative and literal closure,” writes Dr. Doris Maria-Reina Bravo “however, the mark is also an obstacle to any attempts to erase the past.” The scar, like the trauma of displacement, cannot be erased, and true healing is only found in facing what’s been broken.
Trauma
The trauma of war is loss manifested. It simmers beneath the surface, quietly but relentlessly, seeping deep into the survivors’ souls, altering how they navigate their lives and shaping everything from random life moments to the very essence of being.
Dario Robleto’s work engages with the intersection of war and trauma. Often described as a “material poet”, Robleto’s creations explore how conflict reshapes the deepest parts of the human soul, as in his 2004 piece, “A Defeated Soldier Wishes to Walk His Daughter Down the Aisle.”
The installation of a pair of worn military boots struggling through sand and rice, evokes the soldier’s post-war reality, where a man is physically and spiritually fractured. Here, the simple act of walking one’s daughter down the aisle is no longer an act of joy, but one that is weighed down by unspoken grief and a sense of brokenness.
War distorts life, turning family, love, and celebrations into echoes of what might have been. The work lays bare the reality of trauma: the painful gap between who one was and who the war forced them to become.
Survivors of war often grapple with a conflicting spectrum of emotions: the yearning to forget contrasts with the need to remember, personal grief merges with collective mourning, and the urgency to move forward battles against paralysing apathy. The weight of survival feels even heavier than the instinct to live, as the past continues to haunt the present. For many, survival itself, becomes too much to carry, leading them to tragically take their own lives.
How does one go on when their world has been erased? How can a fractured identity be rebuilt when the markers of home no longer exist?
Alfredo Jaar’s “The Eyes of Gutete Emerita” (1996) addresses these harrowing questions by focusing on the trauma borne out of witnessing unimaginable violence. Through a photographic installation centred on the eyes of Gutete Emerita, a woman who witnessed the brutal killing of her husband and two sons during the Rwandan genocide, Jaar forces viewers to see war through her eyes.
Her gaze is haunting, filled with an unbearable knowledge that cannot be unlearned. In her eyes, the enormity of loss is transformed into something deeply intimate yet universally devastating. Jaar’s work acknowledges that trauma is inescapable, a weight carried by those who survive, shaping how they move through a world that they no longer recognise.
Shame
Another aspect of war that is represented through art is the unbearable truth of the actions people are forced to take to survive. Toni Morrisson captures this with devastating beauty in her novel “Beloved,” telling the story of Sethe, a woman tormented by the memory of the daughter she killed to save her from slavery. “It was not a story worth telling” says Sethe, reflecting on the deep shame tied to the most painful choices that can consume one’s soul.
Actions made to preserve life can haunt survivors forever, leaving a stain on their souls that time may never fully erase. Shame, in this context, is not only personal, it’s collective, shaping how societies confront, or fail to confront, their own pasts, and the weight of their own actions or inaction.
But there also is another kind of shame: the shame of witnessing, the shame of being spared, the shame of being safe, of holding onto loved ones, of watching horror unfold, powerless to stop it. Poet Hala Alyan gives voice to this unsettling shame, writing: “I always sign out of my Instagram. I watch and watch. Then I log off. At the core of this is the shame. The shame of the here. The shame of all that the here offers: spare water, radiators, antibiotics, the ability to log off.”
Here, shame is not tied to action, but to inaction, to survival itself. It is the shame of distance, of being both here and there, free yet somehow trapped. This is why war extends beyond the battlefield, haunting even those who are not directly in its path.
In Half-Life in Exile, Alyan captures this torment, the compulsion to bear witness, to transform the wreckage of grief into something tangible:
“Is it compulsive to watch videos?
Is it compulsive to memorize names?
Rafif and Ammar and Mahmoud.”
Later in the poem, she confronts the unbearable question: “Was the grief worth the poem?” It is the guilt of turning devastation into art, of creating something from what should have never been lost, should have never been forgotten.
View this post on Instagram
Christian Boltanski’s “The Reserve of Dead Swiss” (1990) grapples with the collective shame tied to the gradual erasure of the dead from memory. The installation features metal boxes resembling old storage containers containing a photograph of a man or woman, collected by the artist from Swiss obituaries. Illuminated by desk lamps, the repetitive, almost identical structures highlight how the passage of time erases the traces of those who once lived, reflecting a gradual disintegration of memory, and at times, a sense of shame for forgetting, for failing to hold on to those who are no longer with us. As he reflects, “Nowadays we die twice: once at the moment of our death, and the second time when no one recognises us in a photograph.”
By naming and acknowledging the dead, Boltanski’ returns a degree of presence to lives which might otherwise fade into oblivion. It is here that the bitter heart of loss lies: the absence of recognition, the erasure of existence.
This absence resonates powerfully in Gaza, and similar war-torn regions where countless lives end without an obituary, proper funeral, and sometimes even without the retrieval of the body. Perhaps these lives, too, deserve their own metal boxes, their own sanctuary of remembrance.
How do we cope with loss? Can we rebuild what has been destroyed, and if we can, will it ever be the same? The answers are rarely clear, and art, while offering solace or reflection, does not always provide them.
Loss reshapes us, altering our sense of self and of the world in ways we may never fully understand or recover from. Perhaps the question is not whether we can recover from loss, but how we learn to live alongside it.
