‘Art is an important way of depicting these atrocities’: London show shines a light on sexual violence in conflict

“It’s important to discuss it because it’s a war crime. It’s the most neglected war crime, but it is a war crime. It’s not right that in 2025 this is happening all over the world as we speak, in places not really that far away from where we are. And very little is being done about it.” Spoken via video in the first room of the a new exhibition at the Imperial War Museum (IWM) in London, these are the words of The Sunday Times’ chief international correspondent, Christina Lamb.

Lamb has reported from conflict zones around the world for 30 years, and is the author of Our Bodies, Their Battlefield: What War Does to Women, which explores the use and impact of sexual violence as a weapon of war. She is therefore a fitting voice to introduce Unsilenced: Sexual Violence in Conflict—the first major UK museum show to explore this under-reported topic.

The exhibition, which has been six years in the making, takes place against a background of international conflicts throughout which the prevalence of sexual violence has been well documented. The United Nations Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine reports that in the period 24 February 2022— when the Russia invasion of Ukraine began—to 31 August 2024, there were 366 documented cases of conflict related sexual violence against men, women and children. And this is not a new phenomenon—Unsilenced explores stories of sexual slavery and humiliation from the “comfort women corps” of the Second World War to the prisoners of Abu Ghraib.

Uncovering new narratives

For the IWM’s curatorial team, bringing this emotionally fraught exhibition together revealed that, even within the museum’s collections, stories of sexual violence have not always received the attention they deserve. “It’s a pervasive, devastating aspect of war but it’s not talked about,” says Maeve Underwood, one of the show’s three curators. “That’s probably reflected in the museums collecting over the years—we have collected these stories, but we’ve had to re-examine our collection to find them.”

Uncovering these previously hidden narratives led curators to consider how best to share them. New testimonies were gathered from victims and survivors—always with their informed consent—via charities and NGOs. Finding 3D objects directly linked to the topic was not always easy, and so written and oral testimonies, photographs and works of art all play key roles.

In a room titled Representations, propaganda leaflets and posters dating from the First World War to the present day offer a pertinent reminder of the value of visual communication in influencing public opinion. Brightly coloured illustrations, taken from the IWM’s collection and displayed in a new light for Unsilenced, characterise men as fearless protectors of women who are either loose-lipped and promiscuous or weak and virginal.

“These stereotypes or norms that are represented are not harmless—they trickle down and are recreated in other ways,” explains the curator Helen Upcraft. “Sexual violence doesn’t exist in a vacuum.”

Using art to depict atrocity

Elsewhere in the exhibition, works of art become essential historical documents. Photographs by the pioneering image-maker Lee Miller capture the experiences of les tondues (the shaved ones)—French women who were accused or found guilty of collaborating with German forces, and whose heads were subsequently shaved as punishment. There are no known interviews with these women—nor any record of why they committed the crimes of which they were accused—making these images vitally important evidence of gender-based humiliation.

Newly acquired by the IWM for Unsilenced is a miniature Sonyeosang or Statue of Peace, copied from a bronze created in 2011 by the husband-and-wife sculptor duo Kim Seo-kyung and Kim Eun-sung. The original work sits outside the Japanese embassy in Seoul, South Korea, where it commemorates the experiences of so-called “comfort women”—women, largely from Korea, who were forced into sexual slavery by the Imperial Japanese Armed Forces during the Second World War. Other replicas of the work can now be found in Japan, US, Australia and Germany, where they exemplify the ability of such monuments to contribute to both remembering and healing.

Perhaps the exhibition’s most arresting object is a painting by the South African artist Albert Adams. Taken from the IWM’s collection, the abstract, twisted work responds to the torture of Abu Ghraib inmates by the United States Army and the Central Intelligence Agency during the Iraq War. It is in some ways surprising to see these abuses, so often associated visually with the handful of harrowing photographs first published by The New Yorker in 2004, represented in this way.

“It’s just another way of showcasing to people that you can engage with this topic in many different ways,” Upcraft says. “When there is very little photography or filming happening, how else do you depict what’s happening? Art is an important way of depicting these atrocities.”

Curating amid ongoing conflict

Depicting atrocities is, of course, nothing new to the IWM, but does curating an exhibition around such a live issue bring with it new challenges? As the show points out, the war in Ukraine makes displaced children all the more vulnerable to sexual violence. And, in the ongoing Israel-Palestine conflict, mass sexual violence has been reported by both sides. Is such a complex and potentially politically charged issue, traditionally discussed in international courts more often than cultural spaces, squarely within the national museum’s remit?

“I feel that it completely fits into our remit,” Underwood says. “Sexual violence is not often talked about and it’s been going on forever. The conversation has to start somewhere, and I think this is our contribution to that meaningful change that we all want.”

• Unsilenced: Sexual Violence in Conflict, Imperial War Museum, London, 23 May-2 November