Everywhere is War: Art I've seen in Italy this summer

I spent two weeks in Italy this summer. The trip wasn’t planned. I had intended to visit my family in Israel, but when the war caused our flights to be canceled, we found ourselves instead in Rome. It wasn't easy to let go of the idea of seeing our family and friends but, Rome is definitely not a bad place to suddenly find yourself in… especially if you love art (and food...).
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With no itinerary, we simply wandered around. Everywhere we went, we encountered iconic masterpieces. We've seen Michelangelo’s sculptures and frescoes, Botticelli’s paintings, Bernini’s fountains, and so many other works by those towering figures of art history.

While undeniably beautiful and timeless, I couldn’t stop thinking about the mythologies behind them, the religious, patriarchal standards they continue to communicate.

With all due respect, the contemporary art I encountered in Italy felt far braver and urgent.

Two exhibitions in particular stood out:
- "Icarus" by Yukinori Yanagi at the Pirelli HangarBicocca in Milan.
- "Black Soil Poems" by Wangechi Mutu at the Galleria Borghese in Rome. 


Yukinori Yanagi’s Icarus
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Yanagi’s exhibition included several large-scale installations that left me completely unsettled.

As I entered the darkened space, the first thing I saw was a massive mound of debris: yellow barrels marked with radiation symbols, wrecked cars, broken furniture, sandbags in an overwhelming heap of destruction.

At its peak sat a glowing, all-seeing eye, staring back at me as I stared at it. The work, titled Project Godzilla 2025 – The Revenant from “El Mare Pacificum.” The Godzilla eye instantly reminded me of Donna Haraway’s famous description of the “god-trick,” the gaze from above that dominates, surveils, and, as she says, “fucks the world.”

​Right behind this mound of debirs hung Absolute Dud, a replica of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. Unlike the chaotic mound, this piece was minimal, clean, and suspended just above the ground, as if paused in mid-fall.

​It left me wondering: what if it really had been held back? How different would our world look today?

​Finally, across the room stood Banzai Corner: Hundreds of Japanese action figures (Bandai Ultraman), holding their hands up and arranged in a quarter-circle between two mirrors to form the red circle of the Japanese flag.

​The result is an unsettling image of the entanglement of capitalism, nationalism, and pop culture.

For me, Yanagi’s monumental heap of debris negated the heap of marble that forms the Fontana di Trevi in the heart of Rome. One symbolizes abundance, civic pride, and mythological power while the other symbolizes catastrophe, nuclear trauma, and environmental collapse. One is animated by the flow of reviving water, while the other by the toxic residues of modernity.

I saw The Banzai Corner in relation to the sculpture of David by Michelangelo. At first glance, they could not seem further apart: marble versus plastic, singularity versus multiplicity, Renaissance humanism versus postmodern critique. Yet both works rely on the monumental force of the human figure as a vehicle for collective ideals. Michelangelo’s David manifests the heroic body and the weapon he holds, while Yanagi’s chorus of Ultramen, replicated ad infinitum, transforms mass-produced toys into a monumental emblem of nationhood. In this way, the heroic individuality of David and the mirrored collectivity of Banzai Corner converge as two versions of the same impulse: the staging of human form as symbol that embodies civic virtue and nationalist conformity.

Of course, because we had not planned to be there, we were only able to see the replica of David rather than the original, which typically requires reservations made weeks in advance. Yet this in itself deepens my analogy to Yanagi’s Banzai Corner. Florence was full of miniature reproductions of Michelangelo’s hero. Tiny plaster statuettes in shop windows, keychains dangling from tourist stalls, mass-produced souvenirs of the city’s most iconic figure. Just as Yanagi’s corner multiplies Ultraman into an endless chorus of raised arms, the countless Davids scattered across Florence fracture the aura of the singular masterpiece into an infinite field of replicas. 

The rest of Yanagi’s exhibition was no less impressive, provocative, mesmerizing, and deeply unsettling.

Among the most striking works was his renowned The World Flag Ant Farm, an installation composed of a vast grid of sand-filled cases, each patterned with the colored sands of national flags. Into this carefully ordered display Yanagi introduced living ant colonies. As the insects burrowed and tunneled through the sand, they slowly destabilized the flags, carrying particles from one case to another and eroding the crisp boundaries that had once defined each emblem. What starts as a neat taxonomy of nations gradually unravels into a chaotic, hybridized landscape.
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Encountering the Israeli flag in this state was, for me, uncannily disturbing given the current situation in the region and the reason for which I was actually standing in front of this piece. Yet the unsettling power of the work lies precisely in its refusal to isolate one nation from another. Every flag in the installation, whether Israeli, American, Japanese, or otherwise, all succumb to the same process. Each one is subject to transformation and decay, until what remains is no longer a symbol of unity but a record of entropy and interconnection.

​The ants are indifferent to the histories embedded in these flags. They enact a quiet but relentless reminder: political borders and national identities are human constructs.

There were so many other interesting artworks in this exhibition. Many that I will continue thinking about and carrying with me.
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Wangechi Mutu's "Black Soil Poems"

​I have long admired Wangechi Mutu’s work, and I will never forget her extraordinary exhibition at the Legion of Honor back in 2021.

Her chimerical, hybrid beings, simultaneously human, animal, and vegetal, reminding viewers of the possibilities of transformation, which was exactly what I needed to see after the terrible isolation and fear of the COVID-19 pandemic. 
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To discover that Mutu now had an exhibition in Rome was thrilling in its own right.

Like the San Francisco installation, this presentation was situated within an esteemed art institution, this time the Galleria Borghese which hosts an unparalleled treasure of classical sculptures. Walking through its galleries, one encounters Bernini’s Apollo and Daphne or Pluto and Proserpina. These marble works seem to transmute stone into flesh and motion. Against this backdrop, Mutu’s sculptures intervened with a different kind of metamorphosis: bodies made of earth, bronze, shells, and pigments, fusing African mythologies with futuristic imaginaries.

Placed among these canonical masterpieces, her works insist on creating a dialogue. While Bernini’s figures become hybrids through their attempt to escape a disturbing existence, Mutu’s figures exist as hybrids, these creatures are always in their chimeric form, always and already hybrid, and in flux. Seeing her work interspersed with the Borghese collection underscored not only the persistence of myth and metamorphosis in art history, but also the urgency of expanding those myths to include other genealogies, other bodies, other futures.

​One work that especially resonated with me was The Grain of Words. In this piece, Mutu overlays a classical Roman mosaic with letters cut from coffee and tea leaves. These materials carry their own long histories of colonial extraction, trade, and cultural ritual. The mosaic, a fragment of antiquity preserved as part of Rome’s artistic patrimony, becomes the ground upon which Mutu inscribes a different kind of text: not the voices of Roman emperors or mythological heroes, but the words of resistance and liberation.

​The letters spell out the lyrics of Bob Marley’s song War, itself adapted directly from an Emperor, but an Ethiopian one - the words of Haile Selassie’s historic 1963 address to the United Nations.

The opening line is uncompromising: “Until the philosophy which holds one race superior and another inferior is finally and permanently discredited and abandoned, everywhere is war.” 

In Mutu’s hands, these words are not merely quoted but embodied, woven into organic matter that stains and reconfigures the polished surface of classical heritage.

For me, in particular, standing there witnessing this work of art because of the war, carried an uncanny weight. It is clear that these words do not represent a historical statement. Sadly, they continue to stand as a present-tense indictment. Everywhere is war. 

Here are some photos I took at Mutu's 2021 exhibition in San Francisco:

To conclude, I'd say that the war in the Middle East is devastating and I wish for it to end immediately. I have not been able to see my family and friends, and the distance feels unbearable at times. Yet instead, I found myself in Italy. Interestingly, out of all the art I've seen there I found myself resonating mostly with works of art that confront war, violence, and survival.

War is something I think about constantly, not only in relation to the current crisis, nor just in the last two years, but as an ongoing condition that shapes how I understand myself and the world.

I deeply admire artists who can respond to this reality with such strength and courage, giving form to something that feels at once unspeakable and ever-present. Their works remind me that art can be both a record of trauma and a vehicle for resistance, that it can hold grief and hope in the same gesture.

Perhaps one day, I too will be able to find a way to communicate my own thoughts and feelings about war through my art.

In the meantime, and under the shadow of the ongoing war, I am glad and privileged to be alive,  able to spend my time with loved ones, and to have the space to make art, view art, contemplate and write about it. Unfortunately, at the same time, so many people live through unimaginable loss. This awareness humbles me. It also deepens my sense of responsibility to keep searching for ways to imagine how we might yet live beyond war.