Margareta Kern

Thursday War by Margareta Kern (2025 - ongoing) explores militarism's ‘performative contradictions’ - its simultaneous production and disavowal of violence that cinematically collapses the imaginary and real in the service of perpetual war.

Filmed from the artist’s kitchen window over eight years, Thursday War documents the persistent presence of naval exercises off the coast of Cornwall. Using a birdwatching lens, the circular images capture the menace amid mundanity of naval exercises, exposing the ‘everyday’ infrastructure of surveillance and militarism. The project deliberately frames naval manoeuvres through circular, grainy images that evoke both telescopic observation and military optics. Submarines and warships glide slowly through the horizon, transforming military rehearsals into slow-moving tableaux, countering Hollywood's adrenaline-fueled war imagery with the repetitive, mundane, and the unheroic.

The military exercises employ elaborate performative tactics and fictional constructs –  from imaginary terrorist groups, to invented nations like "Brownia" and "Ginger", transforming ‘Thursday War’ from a colloquial name for naval exercises, into a theatre of militarised, racalised fantasy itself.

Through ongoing documentation and engagement - filming the drills, notating, archiving ‘military tweets’, and filing official complaints - the project explores how military training exercises are scripted performances that rehearse and pre-enact violence by appropriating cinematic and theatre techniques. Kern’s Thursday War mirrors and re-appropriates this logic to expose how seemingly unremarkable encounters with military presence normalise political violence, rendering coastal horizon into a stage for perpetual war rehearsals.

Furthermore, Thursday War exposes the liberal militarism’s claims to be the only viable path to security and peace, this ‘pretence’ serving as a cover for reproducing the very violence it purports to prevent. Through constant war rehearsals and preparedness drills, militarism (p)re-enacts its violent logic until it feels real.

Thursday War is a prescient body of work, all the more urgent amidst the escalating militarisation masked as peacekeeping and protectionism.

A ‘Thursday War’ is the colloquial name given in the Royal Navy for the weekly war-fighting exercises that used to culminate on a Thursday. According to NATO, whose warships and submarines regularly take part in wargames off the coast of Cornwall, the forces are asked to respond to a fictitious scenario that resembles what might occur in real life.

Most recently, a ‘Thursday War’ scenario was revamped to include what the Royal Navy describes as “a new four fictitious nations with competing domestic and international ambitions requiring naval intervention under the banner of ‘Operation Mayflower’ (2023)’. For a critical decolonial reading of Mayflower and settler-centered mythology surrounding it to this day, please see Plymouth-based North Star Study Group: Mayflower Myths.

Currently in development, Thursday War project includes an expanded moving-image installation with a specially commissioned sound score developed in collaboration with the renown New York City-based cellist and composer Julia Kent and the award-winning Bosnian-born, German-based soprano Ljiljana Winkler. Supported by the Arts Council England Developing Your Creative Practice Grant 2024.

To follow the development of the project please join my mailing list or contact me to view an extract of the work.