MODERN CONFLICTS

Modern Conflicts
Digital Images
Monika Hauck
A3
2024

Modern Conflicts is a series of photographic and video collages created from layered media sources documenting the buildup and outbreak of the Ukraine War in 2021-2022. Drawing from a range of news footage and imagery, the work explores how conflicting narratives, visual saturation, and the repetition of traumatic content distort meaning and fragment public understanding.

By superimposing stills and video from different outlets, the project highlights the confusion, emotional fatigue, and loss of clarity that arise when individuals are inundated with overlapping and often contradictory accounts. The result is a dense visual language where messages are blurred or re-contextualized entirely, exposing not only the biases embedded in media but also the difficulty of maintaining empathy and a human perspective amid the noise.

Originally presented as part of an interactive audiovisual installation at Lumen Festival in Waterloo, Canada, and later as a standalone series of digital images, Modern Conflicts reflects on the psychological toll of mediated conflict and invites viewers to critically examine how they consume and interpret news in an age of constant information.