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In wartime, artists often play an important role in keeping social structures alive and mitigating suffering. Yet art can also be used as a tool for the propagation of violence or the consolidation of an unjust status quo; the brutal iconography used on the murals in Belfast during the Troubles being a prominent example. Memories of Violence investigates the potential of artwork to bring to the fore often-invisible configurations of violence that span across the globe.

Many peace processes fail to address the legacies of violence and to offer meaningful avenues of repair on the part of perpetrators, some of whom are outside the physical space in which violence was, or continues to be, experienced. Stefanie Kappler looks at situations of violence where societies are implicated in and continue to benefit from the legacies of violence, particularly the peace processes of South Africa, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and Northern Ireland. Bringing together Peace and Conflict Studies with Memory Studies, Kappler examines how art offers an opportunity to achieve a mnemonic peace—a memory-oriented peace that acknowledges the complex ways in which historical violence and its legacies are constituted. While recognizing the power structures that limit artists and curators, Memories of Violence reveals how they can play a role in addressing situations of complex implication; amplify the voices that call for acknowledgment, reparations, and solidarity; and suggest avenues for facilitating this process.

In this collection of essays, Hal Foster reflects on how modernism's utopian frameworks can be reactivated in the face of recent political challenges. 

In both contemporary art and politics since COVID-19, the discourses of modernism and modernity have been challenged by unexpected developments. The convergences between left-wing indigeneity and right-wing nativism, and the political right's appropriation of transgression—long a strategy of the left—point to essential challenges of the modernist project. The five essays of Modernism, Catastrophe, Utopia reflects on such developments, seeking to parse the elements of modernist discourse that remain valid or can be repurposed, and those which must be jettisoned. Literary and cultural critic Hal Foster shows how the constructive, even utopian dimension of modernism might be remotivated in the face of ecological catastrophe, potentially liberating us from a melancholic fixation on our traumatic past.