Not Then, Not Now, Not Ever.

Sawdust bread wrapped in barbed wire or a bloody butcher's block: a simple cube of oak wood bearing the traces of WWI was the starting point for the artworks in the exhibition "1914/1918 - Not Then, Not Now, Not Ever."

Many areas in northeastern France were completely destroyed during World War I. Because of the vast amounts of human and animal remains and the countless unexploded gas shells and grenades, some areas of the infamous "Zone Rouge" remain off limits to this day. A war that ended 100 years ago still leaves its traces in nature.
The Osnabrück artist Volker-Johannes Trieb, initiator of the project "1914/1918 - Not Then, Not Now, Not Ever," has often worked with wood that bears traces of this conflict. His idea was to get artists from the different countries involved in World War I to work with the same material to create a memorial exhibition underlining the 100th anniversary of the war's end.
Thirty-one internationally renowned artists were invited by curator Mattijs Visser to join the project. Each of them was asked to represent one of the 29 signatory states of the treaties of Versailles and the Paris Peace Conference, along with Russia and Ukraine, which had signed a separate peace treaty before the other countries. "We were surprised to see how quickly the artists accepted," he said.

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