PEACE IN PIECES
80 Years after Hiroshima and Nagasaki:
Art, living left archives and new peace movements
Sydney Trades Hall Atrium, 2 to 29 August 2025
Opening: Thursday 7 August at 6 pm. Hosted by Hiroshima Day Committee (Sydney).
Artists in Conversation: Thursday 28 August, 11am
Hosted by The Cross Art Projects. Enter Sydney Trades Hall atrium via 377 Sussex St
Artists: Safdar Ahmed, Lux Eterna, Fitri DK, Alex Gawronski, Dodi Irwandi, Thee Oo, Raquel Ormella, Wok the Rock
Prints: Hiroshima-Nagasaki print set (c.1974) and Hiroshima Day archive, International Campaign Against Nuclear Weapons, Lyn Hovey, Toni Robertson and Chips Mackinolty, Ralf Sawyer, Tin Sheds Workshop (c.1984), and more.
Partners: Jo Holder (The Cross Arts Projects), Neale Towart (Trades Hall Collection, Unions NSW) with Hiroshima Day Committee (Sydney)
The frontispiece to the exhibition Peace in Pieces is a work on paper with elegant Japanese text that says, ‘I want you to know what happened in front of this child that day’. It is addressed ‘For the children and the people of the world’, from the Atomic Bomb Records Association, now the Atomic Bomb Museum in Hiroshima. The text sits beside a black and white photograph of a child’s bandaged face looking at the camera. Her face is scarred by radiation burns and her gaze is unfocused and likely blind. These so-called “residual victims” lived with the stigma of the atomic bomb, not just on their minds and bodies, but with radiated social stigma.
Piece in Pieces honours the memory and tragedy of Hiroshima, watched over by the hibakusha (atomic bomb survivors) and their descendants and allies —especially archivists, artists, photographers and poets, and the citizens who hold world-wide memorials on the 6 and 9 of August — to mark the date the US dropped two nuclear bombs on the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, as children walked to school. The hibakusha legacy continues to press to limit atomic weapons and to stop the escalating wars of annihilation and actions of impunity by heads of states.
Peace in Pieces is part of Peacework, a contemporary exhibition series, which follows I am a woman for peace (Sydney Trades Hall, March-April 2025) looking at Australian women’s protests for peace during the Cold War and the exhibition Forms of Censorship on the history of Australian artworld self-censorship about the “Question of Palestine” (The Cross Art Projects, 2024). Vigilante censorshop shows a clear pattern of influence-peddling – one such example is the “IHRA definition” of antisemitism promoted to stifle any criticism of Israel’s apartheid system. Other definitions exist without a national carve-out, as do existing anti-discrimination laws.
The exhibitions at Sydney Trades Hall engage with a collection widely viewed as one of the few living archives of socially committed art in Australia. It is justifiably renowned for conserving the giant “banners of pride” resplendent with allegorical paintings of ‘Hope’ or ‘Justice’, carried in annual May Day parades to honour the successes of organised labour, but the peace archive is also strong. The exhibitions mobilise context, artefacts, peace protest forms and contemporary art for collective storytelling and research.
Artists have always helped local and international activists to focus dissent and imagine otherwise. Peace in Pieces joins the initiatives of the multi-faceted postwar peace movements in calling for international peace, justice, and unity. Artists remain a creative presence in world-wide Palestine vigils and as critics of Australia’s secretive AUKUS agreements that tie Australia to the Trump presidency’s urging to massively increase defence spending, largely by buying US military hardware and spyware, often from Israel.
The exhibition space is centred by Raquel Ormella’s ‘Future History #2’, a banner showing the United Nations logo as a shredded target. Ormella’s twin white banners, ‘Actions for Peace’ (2025) are suspended and double-sided to offer a pithy summary of how protest is polarised, the text reads: Silent Vigil for Peace and/or Social Disruption for Peace. Ormella deftly fingers a chasm between increasingly repressive government policy and public opinion. Works by the artist/interlocuters in Peace in Pieces apply lessons from the archives to Israel’s systematic genocide in Gaza (2023-2025), ongoing ethnic cleansing in Jerusalem and the West Bank, and the military coup and ethnic cleansing in Myanmar/Burma (2021)—both places where UN agencies, NGOs and media are prevented from functioning. Thee Oo’s poster diptych declaims in Burmese and English text, ‘They got nothing but guns, we got nothing but each other’ (2021).
The hibakusha of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were “contaminated” outcasts but flipped their ostracism by joining together to campaign against nuclear bombs. By the late 1950s they were organising peace conferences, making and archiving survivors’ drawings (over 4000 drawings, mostly collected in 1970s and 2002 as “citizens’ drawings”, now held at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum), and curating exhibitions for community halls around the world to resonate, not just for the past, but for present concerns and future fates. The simplicity of woodblock prints re-frames Fitri D.K’s ‘Living Life in Peace’ (2020) and Dodi Irwandi’s powerful ‘No Justification for Genocide’ (2025), as homages to Picasso’s stark painting ‘Guernica’ (1937), a symbol of anti-fascist resistance and an enduring advocate for peace. Lux Eterna’s audiovisual work ‘Opened in Error’ (2025) memorialises in black and white the deadly legacy of atomic tests and uranium storage in the Pacific in the decades since Hiroshima.
One of the hibakusha’s exhibitions is ‘Children and the World’, a 64-panel set printed in the mid-1970s, comprising mostly black and white landscape photographs, some beautifully handcoloured. The first panel is the child’s photo taken by Yōsuke Yamahata, who made the only immediate record of the devastation at ground zero in Nagasaki. His film (partly irradiated) was seized by the US occupying forces. When the occupiers left seven-years later, Life magazine published his images. The three other sets show the design style of their time but carry the same fervent message. This set was gifted by the Conference of Trade Unions of Setagaya ward, Tokyo.
The ‘Children and the World’ set was toured by the Australian Railways Union, a player in Australia’s 1970s anti-uranium movement, when up to half-a million people rallied annually for Hiroshima Day. A photograph shows the set laid out in a drafty midwinter corner of Chullora Rail Workshop (Tribune, July 1978). The genesis of workplace tours co-incided with two significant exhibitions of contemporary Japanese art presented in not so drafty state galleries around Australia: Hiroshima Panels: Iri Maruki and Toshiko Akamatsu and Contemporary Japanese Art toured in 1958 to all state galleries supported by the Australian and Japanese governments. The initiative comprised eight large painted panels each describing the aftermath of the blast accompanied by a short text. In the exhibition catalogue author Vance Palmer wrote, “the aim is to arouse a sense of the oneness of human beings in the face of suffering” and that these [paintings], “may compel those who see them to vow that such diabolical visitations shall not occur again”.
A year later the photographic exhibition The Family of Man, created by the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1955 and toured by the United States Information Agency in a show of global power, occupied an entire floor of Sydney’s David Jones store. The Family of Man incorporated some of Yōsuke Yamahata’s photographs and featured quotes from religious texts and the United Nations’ 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The unions’ Hiroshima exhibitions follow The Family of Man lineage, pitching to the “oneness of mankind” but worked hard to counter The Family of Man’s evangenical militarism. Photographs were presented magazine-style in sequence organised by the bomb’s impact stages (heat, radiation, and firestorm) with minimal text. Two later sets are instructional and show the new H-bomb process and the US global intelligence and military system.
Safdar Ahmed’s work, ‘Aerial Bombardment’ (2025) comprises 4 drawings for the remarkable book The Nightmare Sequence, a collaboration with poet Omar Sakr. Ahmed compares the detonation impact of: London During the Blitz (1941, 711 tonnes of explosives); Hamburg (1943, 2,326 tonnes) and Hiroshima (1945, the atomic weapon was the equivalent of 16,000 tonnes). The apocalypse that morning in Hiroshima destroyed more than 10.5 square kilometres of the city centre, killing up to 120,000 people and injuring another 40,000, many of whom died in protracted agony from radiation sickness. Deaths were greater in Nagsaki, so the combined total was 246,000 people killed. And Gaza? Safdar Ahmed’s answer is, “From 2023-24, Israel has dropped over 85,000 tonnes” and counting to double the figure over 21 months of bombs and now “food traps”. In the Occupied Palestinian Territory, international law has been defied over and over – war crime after war crime – killing over 60,000 people. As Alex Gawronski explains about his digital painting ‘Special Attention’ (2025): : “By this point Israel has dropped the equivalent of 7 nuclear bombs worth of US munitions on Gaza, a strip of land less than half the size of Canberra. Gaza has been pulverised to resemble photos of Hiroshima and Nagasaki immediately after their annihilation. The Palestinians in Gaza are mainly indigenous refugees, survivors and descendants of the 1948 Nakba. They have never had control of their own territory whether by land, sea or air.” (See full artist statement below.)
Wok the Rock’s work ‘Lie’ (2025) uses the Life magazine cover format of leader’s photo and masthead to present Netanyahu as a leader with no qualms about using starvation as a weapon of war. (Wok’s work was removed from the exhibition but is online). Ahmed, Wok and Gawronski draw on a rich vein of anger in popular culture, notably the manga tradition of Barefoot Gen, a 10-part serial by hibakusha artist Keiji Nakazawa – an account of a child’s survival through the Hiroshima atomic bombing through the register of icy satire.
Yosuke Yamahata, 1945, reproduction of original gelatin silver on paper. 1 of 64 laminated panel set: Children and the World, printed c.1974, curated by the Atomic Bomb Records Association. Trades Hall Collection.
Fitri DK, Living Life in Peace, 2020. Linocut print on paper, edition 1/10, 30 x 23 cm.
Raquel Ormella, Future History #2, 2025, nylon banner, 90 x 147 cm.
Lux Eterna, Opened In Error, 2025, video w/ sound, 7m10s. Courtesy of the artist. (Selected stills).
Video credits: Hiroshima image: Alfred Eisenstaedt, The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images. Nagasaki image: Koyo Ishikawa. All video footage and rapatronic photographs of nuclear detonations are courtesy of the Los Alamos National Laboratory Archives and The Laurence Livermore National Laboratory. First images and drone footage of Runit Dome, Enewetak, Marshall Islands, are by Carolyn Cole. Final image of Runit Dome, Enewetak, Marshall Islands is by Mika Mäkeläinen Audio/Sound/Collage: All by Lux Eterna, except for final music; Creep by Emmit Fenn.
Alex Gawronski, Where’s Daddy?, 2025, digital print on photographic paper, 10 x 59.8 cm.
Alex Gawronski, Special Attention, 2025. Digital print and paint on stretched canvas, 101 x 152.5 x 4 cm.
Toni Robertson and Chips Mackinolty (Earthworks Poster Collective), Daddy what did you do in the nuclear war?, 1977, Giclee print, 2nd edition 2018, 76.1 x 50.7 cm. Trades Hall Collection.
Safdar Ahmad, Aerial Bombardment, 2025, digital print on fabric, 90 x 90 cm.
Thee Oo, They got nothing but guns, we got nothing but each other (translation from Burmese), 2021, inkjet print on matte poster paper, 52.5 x 105 cm
Dodi Irwandi, Untitled, 2025, woodblock on fabric, 60 x 89 cm. Courtesy of the artist.
Wok The Rock, Lie, 2025, screenprint on paper, edition 8/10, 30 x 30 cm. Courtesy of the artist.
Raquel Ormella, Actions for Peace, 2025, cotton and acrylic (2 sided banner), 124 x 170 cm. Courtesy of the artist.
Peace in Pieces, Sydney Trades Hall, 2025 (installation view). Photo: Silversalt.
Raquel Ormella, Actions for Peace, 2025, cotton and acrylic (2 sided banner), 124 x 170 cm. Courtesy of the artist.
Peace in Pieces, Sydney Trades Hall, 2025 (installation view). Photo: Silversalt.
Children and the World, printed c.1974, various Japanese photographers + single hibakusha (atomic bomb survivor) drawing, 11 selections of 64 laminated panel set, curated by the Atomic Bomb Records Association. Trades Hall Collection.
Peace in Pieces, Sydney Trades Hall, 2025 (installation view). Photo: Silversalt.
Lux Eterna, Opened In Error, 2025, video w/ sound, 7m10s. Courtesy of the artist. (Selected stills).
Video credits: Hiroshima image: Alfred Eisenstaedt, The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images. Nagasaki image: Koyo Ishikawa. All video footage and rapatronic photographs of nuclear detonations are courtesy of the Los Alamos National Laboratory Archives and The Laurence Livermore National Laboratory. First images and drone footage of Runit Dome, Enewetak, Marshall Islands, are by Carolyn Cole. Final image of Runit Dome, Enewetak, Marshall Islands is by Mika Mäkeläinen Audio/Sound/Collage: All by Lux Eterna, except for final music; Creep by Emmit Fenn.
Trades Hall’s peace collection spans pamphlets created by pioneer social realist and expressionist artists from the war against fascism in Spain in the 1930s to the Cold War decades including posters of anti-colonial protest and against the War on Vietnam. Collaborative protest changed artmaking by feminist and conceptual artists with many adopting the edgy language of high-visibility street posters, such as within Toni Robertson and Chips Mackinolty’s ‘Daddy what did you do in the nuclear war?’ (1977), where mutated children repurpose a cloying 1914 pro-conscription pamphlet. The original pamphlet ‘Daddy, What Did You Do in the Great War?’, was a British First World War recruitment poster by Savile Lumley and first published in March 1915 by the Parliamentary Recruiting Committee, was adopted by British Empire colonies and ex-colonies like Australia.
In 1970s Australia the cry for Land Rights, Not Uranium was heard against uranium mining, especially in Kakadu, on land owned by the Mirarr people. Aboriginal people were bitterly fought by the government with high-minded claims of “national interest at stake” and by threatening protestors with, “Shut up and sit down … [or] you won’t have anything.” The dramatic Women for Survival peace camps opposing US communications and signals intelligence surveillance bases in Australia, were inspired by the Greenham Common model of creative protest and held during the 1980s.[1] Lyn Hovey’s off-set poster ‘Close Pine Gap’ (1984) announced carnivalesque events on desert roads. For those who campaign today for Palestine and against nuclear testing, uranium mining and associated nuclear waste dumps in Australia, the claim of “national interest” is still made, as are real threats. With a few exceptions, Western nations are handwringing instead of sanctioning.
From the time of the First Gulf War in the 1990s, violent conflict has been broadcast as a lurid real time spectacle of an endless war against ‘barbarians’. Art theorist, Hal Foster’s Afflicted Powers: Capital and Spectacle in a New Age of War (2002), argued that current interactions between media and military technologies extend and affirm an age-old, wartime subjecthood, “defined against cultural otherness both within and without.” The price of our edification is the lives of journalists, writers, photographers and artists, alongside overwhelming numbers of civilian and military deaths.
In the atrium of Trades Hall these contemporary artworks resound with artistic calls for solidarity, from an internationalist outlook that encourages not just cultural diversity, human rights, and creative freedom, but the rule of law. Peace in Pieces creates past-present ideas for peace after the brutal opening quarter of the twenty-first century. First among these ideas is to boycott and sanction Israel and Burma’s leaders and juntas and to join the United Nations Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.[2]
As we approach the 80th anniversaries of the horrific bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, send a letter to the Prime Minister and Foreign Minister to back us up in Canberra.
Artist & Speaker Biographies
Safdar Ahmed: is a Sydney-based artist. His work was included in Documenta15 in Kassel (2022), in collaboration with the Refugee Art Project. His graphic novel Still Alive, about the Australian detention system, won the NSW Premier’s Literary Award in 2022 and his collaboration with poet Omar Sakr on the brutal colonial occupation of Palestine called the Nightmare Sequence (QUP, 2024)is also acclaimed. Safdar is a member of eleven a collective of contemporary Muslim Australian artists, writers, and curators.
Lux Eterna: is an interdisciplinary artist and teacher whose work looks at decolonial strategies in performance and video. Works from her last solo exhibition Decolonising the Gaze featured in a group exhibition at the Museum of the Palestinian People, in Washington DC and at the Australian Embassy in Washington. Her work combines metaphor and poetics and her video work Opened in Error for Piece in Pieces narrates the catastrophic American nuclear tests in Japan and in the Pacific (by the US and France), uses these devices to terrifying effect to show enduring contamination.
Fitri D.K: Fitri uses graphic art techniques (especially hardboard cuts) and performance to challenge social stereotypes and documents women campaigning for environmental justice to ensure their voices are heard in patriarchal cultures. Her exhibition Nuawiji Ibu Bumi/Mother Earth at Cemeti Institute Yogyakarta in 2025 commemorated the long struggle of the Indigenous Samin (or sedelur sikep) people of Kendeng mountains in Central Java whose ancestral agricultural systems and beliefs are threatened by cement mining and production multinationals (subsidiaries of the German HeidelbergCement AG) operating on or imposing on their land. Fitri is a member of SURVIVE! Garage community, Taring Padi art collective, and vocalist of the folk band Dendang Kampungan.
Alex Garwronski: is an art lecturer, writer, artist, and convenor of independent project spaces in Sydney – ethan frome, KNULP and Institute of Contemporary Art Newtown. His curatorial and art projects are known for their wit and ferocious inversions of spaces in the spirit of Kazimir Malevich’s ‘Black Square’. He has been a constant participant in rallies for Palestine and a fierce commentator on the artworld’s aporia (or sleeps of reason) from the interlocked perspectives of art, moral witness, and politics.
Sara Haddad: is an editor and writer and author of The Sunbird (QUP, 2024). The novel slips between the reverie of dispossession and expulsion and fact, to evoke the brutal century long history of Palestinian dispossession.
Dodi Irwandi: works predominantly on woodcut and printmaking in monochrome to enable a play of light, shadow, depth, and emotion. His subjects heroize the wisdom and concepts of marginalized rural workers. His work has been exhibited in Indonesia, and internationally in Germany, Netherlands, France and Australia. He is part of the “Dendang Kampungan” (or folk songs) band and Taring Padi arts collective.
Thee Oo: is an Illustrator and graphic designer. Because of her interest in movies and music, her works mostly have an earthy or vintage style. Women, flora and fauna have been her inspirations. Her artworks celebrate mankind, the errors we make, the arts we create, the beliefs we fight for and the love we dream of.
Raquel Ormella: works across a wide range of media that form the visual cultures of protest and resistance (posters, banners, video, zines and textiles). Recurring themes in her projrects are social and environmental activism; nationalism; and national identity. The banners featured in Peace in Pieces are from ‘Am I In Your Way?’, which opened at Canberra Contemporary in 2025, a project which looked at how the symbolic siting of Australia’s national capital aids the formation of a national identity of selective memory and commemoration.
Wok the Rock: is an artist and curator (including the ArtJog event) and is active across the fields of contemporary art, design and music. He is a member of artist collective Ruang MES 56 in Yogyakarta (established 2010), runs Yes No Wave Music and curates a monthly experimental music concert series Yes No Klub, and has initiated the Indonesia Netaudio Forum and participated in experimental events across Southeast Asia and Europe. Wok has co-produced local bands such Senyawa, and art-music collective Punkasila and Dialita, an all women choir of political survivors.
Notes
- Pine Gap US-Australia Joint Defence Facility became operational in 1970. Protests have been held outside the CIA facility’s gates by the Peace Pilgrims in 1976, Women for Survival (1980s), against war against Iraq and Afghanistan (2002 to 2016) and by Mparntwe for Falestin (2023-25). The Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp in Berkshire, England and the Comiso (Sicily) women’s peace camp La Ragnatela, in 1983. WFS groups were located across Australia.
- The exhibition Art and Activism in the Nuclear Age, Tin Sheds Gallery University of Sydney, 2022. Initiated by the International Campaign Against Nuclear Weapons (ICAN), winner of the 2017 Nobel Peace Prize. ICAN is working for Australia to join the United Nation’s Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, an initiative embraced in South East Asia and the Pacific. #nuclearban ICAN.
Acknowledgements
Thanks to the artists present and past. In Sydney to Neale Towart, Denis Doherty, Peter Murphy, and the NSW Teachers Federation. In Wollongong to Peter Rathborne and Alexander Brown. At The Cross Art Projects: Catriona Moore, intern Leyi Xia and Iain Wilson.
