Theater of Operations

"Theater of Operations: The Gulf Wars 1991-2011" is a catalogue produced in connection with an exhibition curated by Peter Eleey, presented at MoMA PS1 in New York. The book brings together works by a wide range of artists who engaged, directly or obliquely, with the two decades of conflict in the Persian Gulf region, beginning with the 1991 Gulf War and extending through the Iraq War and its long aftermath. Rather than functioning as a conventional historical survey, the volume approaches its subject through the lens of contemporary art, asking how visual culture absorbed, resisted, or reflected the experience of prolonged and often televised warfare.

The bilingual title, rendered in both English and Arabic, signals one of the book's central concerns: the Gulf Wars were not only military and political events but also profoundly mediated ones, filtered through news broadcasts, government messaging, and the emerging visual grammar of twenty-four-hour cable coverage. Eleey's curatorial premise takes seriously the idea that these wars were experienced by most people not on the ground but through screens, and the artists included in the catalogue respond to that mediated distance in varied and often unsettling ways. The book includes reproductions of paintings, sculptures, photographs, video stills, and installation works, accompanied by scholarly essays that situate the pieces within broader discussions of war imagery, spectacle, and the politics of representation.

One of the strengths of this catalogue lies in its refusal to offer a singular narrative about the wars themselves. Instead, it assembles a constellation of artistic responses that range from the abstract to the documentary, from irony to solemnity. Some works directly reference specific events or imagery associated with the conflicts, such as the burning oil fields of Kuwait or the now-infamous photographs from Abu Ghraib, while others engage more obliquely with themes of surveillance, desert landscapes, or the psychological toll of distant warfare on domestic populations. This range allows the book to function less as a chronological history and more as a meditation on how art can process events that are simultaneously immediate and abstracted through media saturation.

The accompanying essays, written by scholars and critics with expertise in art history and visual culture, provide useful context for readers who may not be familiar with the specific artists or the historical details of the Gulf Wars. These texts avoid overtly polemical stances, instead focusing on formal and conceptual analysis of the works themselves. This restraint is appropriate given the sensitive and still-contested nature of the subject matter, though some readers seeking overt political commentary may find the tone somewhat measured. The essays succeed in drawing connections between disparate works, highlighting recurring motifs such as the depiction of technology, the desert as a site of both combat and abstraction, and the human body as a site of vulnerability and violence.

Visually, the catalogue is well produced, with high-quality reproductions that do justice to the range of media represented, from large-scale paintings to more ephemeral installation and performance documentation. The inclusion of both English and Arabic text is a thoughtful choice that acknowledges the international and cross-cultural dimensions of the conflicts and their representation, though the balance of perspectives leans more heavily toward artists working within Western institutional contexts. This is not necessarily a flaw, but it does shape the overall scope of the project, and readers interested in a more geographically or culturally comprehensive survey of Gulf War-related art may need to supplement this volume with other sources.

Overall, "Theater of Operations" succeeds as a thoughtful and well-curated examination of how contemporary art has grappled with two decades of conflict that reshaped geopolitics and altered public perceptions of war itself. It is best suited to readers with an interest in contemporary art, visual culture, or the intersection of media and warfare, rather than those seeking a straightforward military or political history. The catalogue's strength lies in its willingness to sit with ambiguity, presenting works that resist easy interpretation and instead invite sustained reflection on the complicated relationship between representation, memory, and armed conflict. As a document of a significant exhibition, it offers a valuable record of how artists during this period sought to make sense of wars that were, for many, experienced primarily as images.