INSTITUTE FOR THE HARMONIOUS DEVELOPMENT OF ART AND PHOTOGRAPHY

Military Museum Displays

Strangelove is a long-running and still unfinished investigation into the meaning of weapons in peacetime. By examining their public manifestation P.W.Voigt exposes the emotions lying behind them. He shows us the devout silence of the museum, where weapons are sometimes relics of glorious victories and sometimes a protest against senseless destruction. Their meaning changes over time. The promise of destruction becomes the memory of the promise, the excitement makes way for sentiment and pathos.

Text: Wim Melis, Human Conditions Exhibition Catalogue. Noorderlicht

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Top Gun Club, National Naval Aviation Museum
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Darth Vader, White Sands Missile Range

This Darth Vader helmet was given to White Sands Missil Range by Ben Burtt of Lucas Films in appreciation for the assistance he received in collecting sounds for the studio’s sound library. He visited the range twice in 1978 to collect sounds of various missiles being test-fired, including a HAWK missil, a Lance and a Nike Tomahawk. He also recorded the sound of a sound wave traveling up and down a tight guy wire on a radio tower. Some of these sounds were used in the movie, Star Wars, for which Burtt won an Academy Award.

Life on earth touched by Trinity Test.

Trinity was the code name of the first detonation of a nuclear weapon, conducted by the United States Army on 5:29:45 AM July 16, 1945, as part of the Manhattan Project.The test was of an implosion-design plutonium device, of the same design as the Fat Man bomb later detonated over Nagasaki, Japan. The name “Trinity” was assigned by J. Robert Oppenheimer, the director of the Los Alamos Laboratory, inspired by the metaphysical poet John Donne.

Water Dispenser. National Naval Aviation Museum
Water Dispenser, National Naval Aviation Museum
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Hand grenade model, Armed Forces History Museum

More American Monuments




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An Iconography of missiles

An intriguing exhibition with Simon Norfolk, P.W. Voigt and Gabriel Jones.

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A brief visit to the Creation Evidence Museum in Texas.

American Monuments

People want leadership not only from the living but from the dead.

Explore the Institute




New Evidence

The Strangelove Collection at Concertgebeauw Brugge 2019

Nucleus

The Strangelove Collection at the Noorderlicht Photofestival 2017.

Project Gnome

Nuclear test site of the Gnome Project.

Sacred photograms

Up in smoke.