A large globe, its continents outlined in red, buzzes as we near it. It bathes the space around it in a red glow, a colour we’re evolutionarily hard-wired to associate with danger. Mona Hatoum launched this work in 2009, but it feels more relevant with each day in a world filled with wars and climate disasters. It’s the work that greets visitors who enter the Seeds of Hate and Hope exhibition at the Sainsbury Centre in Norwich, part of the ‘Can we stop killing each other?’ season.
It’s not the only artwork that will leave a lasting impact on viewers. Jakkai Siributr has created wearable military uniforms, but look inside the camouflage hat, and there’s an image of a weeping woman with flames behind her. It’s a powerful look at the refugees at the Thai-Myanmar border. Ishichi Miyako’s photographs of damaged clothing are of the ghostly remnants of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and Alfredo Jaar shows every cover of the magazine Newsweek from the start of the Rwandan genocide until it finally made it on the cover.
We would expect an exhibition covering genocides, ethnic cleansing, war crimes and crimes against humanity to contain many hard-hitting artworks, and there’s no lack of them in this show. However, it also includes works that push back against the perpetrators of these atrocities. Gideon Rubin redacts every page of Adolf Hitler’s book Mein Kampf, and Indre Serpetyte takes ISIS videos and reduces them to the colours they use, leaving us with a Piet Mondrian-style sculpture of simply blocks of colour.
There are familiar artists in this exhibition, including a film by William Kentridge confronting the legacy of Apartheid in South Africa, and a moving drawing by Denzil Forrester of his friend who died in police custody. However, there are also new artists to me, such as Peter Oloya, who was forced into being a ‘child soldier’ for the Lord’s Resistance Army and now creates sculpture as part of his healing. Zoran Music’s figurative drawings are hard to forget once you realise he drew them while in the Dachau concentration camp.
I usually visit an exhibition, and a couple of artworks stay with me. However, given that every artwork has such a powerful narrative, I’m still processing almost all the works I’ve seen in this show. It’s a testament to the two co-curators, Tafadzwa Makwabarara and Jelena Sofronijevic, for pulling together such an impactful exhibition.
Given the weight of the topic and the quality of the works, this is an exhibition I won’t forget anytime soon. The exhibition opens with George Santayana’s famous quote,
“those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it”.
Seeds of Hate and Hope is a reminder of the past and ongoing atrocities from across the world, the hate that exists, but also the hope for a better future if we can learn from the past.
Seeds of Hate and Hope – until 17th May
Sainsbury Centre Norwich, Entrance is free.
First image: © Mona Hatoum. All rights reserved, DACS 2025. Image courtesy of White Cube. Photo: Stephen White. Second image: Copyright: Ishiuchi Miyako. Courtesy of Michael Hoppen Gallery. Third image: Courtesy of Gideon Rubin. Forth image: Courtesy of the Sainsbury Centre Collection. © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2025
