Featuring work by Kamrooz Aram, Huma Bhabha, Paolo Chiasera, Matthew Day Jackson, Jen DeNike, Ignacio Lang, Adam Helms, Rachel Mason, Nebojša Šeric-Shoba

Smith-Stewart is pleased to present WARLORD, a group exhibition featuring work by nine international artists: Kamrooz Aram, Huma Bhabha, Paolo Chiasera, Matthew Day Jackson, Jen DeNike, Ignacio Lang, Adam Helms, Rachel Mason and Nebojša Šeric-Shoba. The exhibition explores an unsettling reality happening today in many of the world’s worst areas of conflict—the emergence of the contemporary warlord.

Warlords are powerful and dangerous figures, perpetuating regional instability for profit. Depending on whom you ask, they are national heroes, fighting for their countries’ cause, or mass murdering gangsters out to kill and make millions. In the early 1990s, they appeared in the Balkans and later in Chechnya and continue to flourish today in, most prominently, Afghanistan and across Africa—Somalia, Nigeria, Niger, Sudan.

Spanning painting, works on paper, installation, sculpture, performance and video, the works in the exhibition attempt to address the global implications of contemporary conflict and its evolving impact on the face of history. Some artists in the exhibition present us with ominous characters extracted from recent times while others invent imaginary warlords or portray the havoc wrecked.