Short Stories about War: Women – exhibition, ADM Gallery, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, part of The Seventeenth International conference on The Image 2026
Exhibition date: 30th September – 9th October 2026
Iwona Abrams’ project Short Stories about War: Women was part of a group exhibition The Image as Advocate: Shaping Cultural Conversations. The project explores how images can stimulate historical awareness through the transmission of collective trauma and demonstrate the value of images in empowering people through acts of sharing. The works attempt to break the silence around the forgotten history of war rape and aim to initiate a broader dialogue in society about rape and violence against women in the contemporary context of sexual violence as a weapon of war
Presented works were developed from a fragment of recorded speech: a woman’s voice saying: ‘and he was raping her.’ This fragment was translated into a waveform – a basic two-dimensional visual representation of an audio signal – and subsequently transformed into multiple laser-cut geometric shapes used to construct sound necklaces. The choice of jewellery as a medium is central to this approach. Jewellery occupies a space between the personal and the cultural, often functioning as an object of inheritance and memory. Within this context, the necklaces establish a link between personal testimony and collective memory, situating individual experience within a broader historical framework. The artworks retain a trace of the original voice but resist direct legibility. They do not narrate events; instead, they operate as material carriers of testimony, embedding fragments of speech within physical form. Testimony is reconfigured across visual media through a methodological act of translation using expanded medium of print and video recording.
Through the artworks that interweave threads of family and politics, and were produced using original source (voice recording), the works ask how collective memories of historical traumas are transmitted across generations and how the construction and interpretation of history can aid moving forward. Employing a variety of materials and visual form strategies, the complex relationships are explored where memory, history, past and present intersect. Rather than approaching history through macro-political narratives, this practice-based project examines how memory persists through the micro scale of human perspective involving acts of sharing.
Short Stories about War: Women consists of a series of 10 relief prints produced from laser cut 4mm MDF woodcuts, printed on GF Smith Munken Polar Smooth Crisp White 150 gsm paper, 45 x 64cm each, an installation comprising of 7 laser-cut ‘sound necklaces’ suspended in space and mp4 Video, 1:04 min long with sound (on loop), digital monitor.
