The “Lebanese Civil War” ended in October 1990. Most militias were given six months to disarm and two options: sell their weapons cheaply to the Lebanese army or sell them freely on the open market. Most chose the market, sending their arms to Serb, Bosnian, Croat, and Slovene forces preparing for a war that began barely a month after the Lebanese militias laid down their guns. 

 

Thus, the wars in Yugoslavia were fought, in part, with weapons from Lebanon. One war ends, another begins. The weapons moved easily from one battlefield to the next. This time, however, something else traveled with them.

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The Lebanese weapons were shipped to Yugoslavia on wooden pallets. When the shipment was unloaded, someone noticed that beneath the weapons, painted onto the surface of the pallets, were images —beautiful copies of canonical Arab,  Turkish, and Iranian paintings. Oddly, the originals of these works have not been seen in decades; their owners long ago reported them missing or stolen. Who made these copies? Why paint them on pallets? Why hide them beneath weapons shipped to Ljubljana? And where are the originals? We still don’t know.

 

Fortunately, the Slovene army preserved the pallets and following protocol, handed them to the Moderna Galerija for study. The museum stored them in a warehouse just outside Ljubljana, where they remain today, and where I first saw them years ago. 

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This installation replicates that warehouse arrangement.