Visions of war
An old Palestinian couple, uneasily at home in a Jordanian refugee camp, bicker and complain to an interviewer. An unlikely picture of war emerges in the 10-minute video, one of personal moments. The old man says of the aftermath of one battle, “For 60 days, a stone was my pillow.” The video — rendered colorful and cartoonish with a technique called “rotoscoping” — is “Larvae Channel 2,” a 2009 production by young Egyptian artist Wael Shawky. It is one of a panoply of works — videos, photographs, animations, slide shows, games, and collages — in the latest exhibition at Harvard’s Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts: “The Image in Question: War – Media – Art,” on view through Dec. 23. In one curtained alcove, the sounds of machine guns rip in Peggy Ahwesh’s “She Puppet, USA 2001,” an exploration of femininity in the age of video war games. In “War Without Bodies 1991/1996,”...