Politicians would hardly ask this question, artists would.

"Why is it important - today - to show and look at pictures of destroyed human bodies?" One thinks of Syria, Mali or Afghanistan.

Is it important to see such images from war zones in order to be able to imagine the extent of the suffering?

The question that Thomas Hirschhorn raised in 2012 seems macabre, but artists have been answering it urgently for centuries: in pictures in which they have worked through and intensified the destruction. Hirschhorn, however, refers to photographs from everyday war life that are produced, shared and distributed without aesthetic demands - recordings which we prefer to be spared and which, according to the Swiss artist, do not appear in “daily newspapers and television news”. In his opinion, war becomes “acceptable and measurable” if one does not look at the “redundancy of violence” and its images, which he himself demonstrated in a series of disturbing image installations and in them polemical connections between war, capitalism and Consumer culture asserts.

The Spaniard Cristina Lucas is more sober, but no less effective, in a monumental three-channel video that is now the focus of her solo exhibition in the Chemnitz art collections: “Unending Lightning”. The artist, who was born in 1973 and lives in Madrid, caught the attention of a biennale-savvy audience at the Manifesta in Palermo in 2018; a few years earlier the Kunstverein Braunschweig had dedicated her first monographic show in Germany. In “Infinite Lightning Strikes”, Lucas documents the history of air strikes on the civilian population since the invention of motorized flight and the first crossing of the English Channel. The first attack by plane occurred in 1911 during the war between the Kingdom of Italy and the Ottoman Empire, when the Italian Air Force, in retaliation,dropped a two-kilogram bomb near Tripoli.

The chronology of the bombing of civilians who have just perished all over the world over the past 100 years, as shown by the photos on the right-hand panel, unfolds on three huge screens, which are set up as a triptych in front of a couch. On the left, data and facts are listed in meticulous completeness such as the location, cause and originator of the attacks, as well as the date and number of victims; On the central board, a world map is filled with black dots from bomb attacks, each of which is signaled by a short flash of lightning - a continuous and darkening atlas is created. In a series of embroidery, Lucas also uses it to make textile pictures, the softly shimmering appearance of which contradicts the occasion.

For her history of the victims of attacks from the air, the artist uses the multimedia work she started in 2015 from databases of research associations. To this day, “Unending Lightning” has grown to a duration of six hours. Lucas expects the audience to see images of mutilations here and there, but uses them sparingly. One is drawn into the maelstrom of events without averting one's gaze, allowing that redundancy of image and violence to take effect - seeing a catastrophic century, told and counted on the basis of anonymous war victims. Precisely the meticulous counting makes this story seem excessive. Lucas adds a sarcastic punchline to her “Unending Lightning” memorial through a modest work in the same room: on a monitor we see a single-engine piper flying over a city,the innocent aviator pulls a banner behind him with the equation "L = (1/2) d v2 s CL" - it stands for physical lift.

The “machine at a standstill” in the title of Lucas' Chemnitz exhibition is due to the wrecked container ship “Ever Given”, which blocked the Suez Canal for days in March and thus brought world trade to a standstill. Other works in the show make references to the city of Chemnitz, which in turn was bombed in March 1945 - and underwent a structural change after the fall of the Iron Curtain, which Lucas ironically illuminates in a video work on the fall of the industrial city of Liverpool. Several clever, poetic works focus on Karl Marx's “Capital” and the increase in value of this book in the auction trade; the essences that make up the human body and how these are suitable for use as colors for painterly abstraction, or a cinematic poem about climate change at the North Pole.Your magnum opus on the so-called collateral damage of modern warfare will hardly top Lucas for the time being.

Cristina Lucas - machine at a standstill.

In the Chemnitz art collections;

until October 31st.

The catalog (DCV Verlag) costs 34 euros.