Current and announcment

Szymon Kobylarz “Once Upon a War”

Szymon Kobylarz’s exhibition “Once Upon a War” develops the subjects related to militarisation of childhood addressed by the artist in his long-years practice conducted in both material and symbolic layer. Kobylarz concentrates on children’s military toys as carriers of ideology and emotions which – although disguised as entertainment – model social imagination from an early age.

By using brittle materials and rescaled toys, which become images for adult audience, the artist plays with military iconography and symbolic of violence. The digital macrophotographs of damaged plastic soldiers present their deformations, cracks and wounds in close-up. Blown up to human size, they become portraits of “sacrificial victims’ bodies” – as if taken from a battlefield. Thereby, Kobylarz refers to the problem area addressed by Susan Sontag in Regarding the Pain of Others, in which the author describes aesthetisation of violence and exhaustion of empathy. As the artist critically approaches the subject of aesthetisation, he undermines the legitimacy of presenting war in aesthetic form only to consume the image. His photographs are not “pretty” – they are disturbing, almost inconvenient, because instead of portraying victims, they depict carriers of the silent systemic violence: the seemingly innocent toys with the hidden function of familiarising war.

The exhibition title – “Once Upon a War” – mischievously refers to the iconic educational animated series Once Upon a Time… Life, which explained the functioning of the human body in a simplified and accessible way. Following this concept, Kobylarz constructs reversed visual education: He enters the area of didactics on the one hand, and deconstructs it on the other, to present how education through play can reproduce violence.

In the spirit of Anti-Kriegs-Museum in Berlin, which attempts to present war “without glory”, from the viewpoint of ordinary people, victims and ruins, the artist also reverses the perspective. Instead of a heroic narrator or a military genius, the protagonist of his works is a brittle cardboard tank or a deformed plastic soldier, often missing a gun, his legs, his face. It is a children’s version of the non-soldier story about war, which does not glorify, but decodes the processes of romanticisation and ideologisation of fight.

Moreover, the project analyses sociological patterning behind the upbringing of boys (and, to a lesser extent, girls) in the spirit of competition, strength and dominance. The generation of the 1970s and ‘80s grew up in the shadow of war narratives: popular TV series such as Four Tank-Men and a Dog and More Than Life at Stake offered a simple vision of the conflict – adventurous, honourable, and fair. Playing “war” used to be something natural, integrating the peers, building group identity and hierarchy. Kobylarz’s project poses a question: What effect did this innocent game have on forming the later social roles, especially on masculinity? He also addresses the subject of militarisation of childhood today, at the time when military issues and wars have become our daily standard, not only on the media, but in life, that of our children as well.

Military toys, presented by the artist with brutal honesty and brittleness at the same time, are not only traces of private childhoods – they become material artefacts of systems, which familiarise war, hierarchy, violence. Demilitarisation of childhood,which is the focus of this project, not only objects to particular tools (weapon-toys, computer games, warfare simulations), but attempts to reveal cultural patterns, which teach us that violence makes sense, and victory requires sacrifice.

Szymon Kobylarz does not create a museum of nostalgia. He creates a counter-museum of war – a space of critical review of daily, seemingly neutral objects, which have an educational function of telling a story that should not be inherited by children. His works are presented with a private long-term collection of photographs and magazines, which are often found in children’s rooms. “Mały modelarz” [The Young Model-Maker] teaches not only agility and historical knowledge, but also civil defence disguised as a game. Looking at his works through such a critical lens, we can appreciate the artist’s imagination, but also reflect on purposeful education of the future citizens, to whom war should remain alien, and who, hopefully, will never come in contact with this subject.

Szymon Kobylarz’s exhibition constitutes insightful criticism of the society, which – desensitised by the excess of violent images – almost intangibly internalises the presence of war as a permanent element of everyday life. In the face of everlasting armed conflicts in the world, their narratives, aesthetics, and logics penetrate all layers of social life – also the most vulnerable and formative one: the childhood.

Analysing the process of militarisation of children’s culture, Kobylarz not only reveals the scale of symbolic violence present in seemingly neutral objects – such as military toys – but also asks a question about the boundaries of our common consent to violence. His works demonstrate that the presence of war in play is not the innocent echo of history, but an active mechanism of reproducing military imagination, which legitimises violence as a tool of conflict resolution.

From this perspective, demilitarisation of childhood is not a protective gesture towards the youngest, but a necessary act of resistance – cultural and political – against the world, in which war is still a norm. It is in the childhood – in the space of imagination, play, and symbolic gestures – that we can initiate the process of forming a different language of relations, free from the logic of dominance and competition. Kobylarz suggests that pacifism does not start with declarations of adults, but from the forms which we use to teach children how to look at the world.

In this sense, his exhibition is not only an artistic statement debunking the mechanisms of violence hidden in reality, but also a proposal of an alternative imaginarium – such, which resists war both as a political fact and as a way of thinking, upbringing, and organisation of community.

Curator
Marta Czyż

The exhibition opening will take place on Friday, August 1st, 2025, at 5:00 PM. Admission to this event is free. Feel free to join us!

Cooperation
Michał Jędrzejowski

Graphic design
Kasia Goczoł

Graphic
Main photo from the archive of Szymon Kobylarz; background photo fragments: Mohammed Ibrahim, Gaza, 2022; Martinus Schouman, Explosion of Gunboat No. 2, 1832; Jerney Pompe; Pieter Post, Engagement of the Cavalry, 1631; Nikolai Kull, Rünnak, 1943; Museums Victoria via Unsplash.