We are pleased to invite you to the opening of Guns ’n’ Games, an exhibition by Budapest-based artist Milada Kopeliovich.

The opening will take place 10 September from 6-10PM at our Prometheus gallery in Amsterdam (Achtergracht 17-19). Music and drinks on us!

Vladimir Shalamov, curator:

"In Guns and Games, Milada Kopeliovich explores the gradual transformation of weapons from exceptional instruments of war into familiar objects of everyday life. Bright, plastic, almost comical toy guns appear in the hands of children. What should remain a symbol of violence becomes an element of play, education and everyday experience.

Acclimatisation to violence begins long before a person can use a real weapon. It enters childhood through games, education, popular culture, political rhetoric and images of war. A child may not yet understand death, but already knows how to hold a gun. Militarisation begins not with recruitment, but with the formation of a worldview in which violence is presented as natural.

The children in Kopeliovich’s paintings occupy a space between play and reality, childhood and adulthood, innocence and responsibility. The plastic gun is still a toy, but already a rehearsal. The game is not yet war, but it is already a cultural model of weaponised conflict.

This boundary is becoming increasingly difficult to recognise. Children today grow up surrounded by images of catastrophe on screens, in news feeds and social media, and in the conversations of adults. War becomes a background condition; violence becomes visual noise. At the same time, childhood itself contracts. Children are taught the language of strength, enemies and victory before they have learned to understand the value of human life. They become “little adults” — without power, but already familiar with its symbolic language.

The biblical story of Cain and Abel provides the project with its fundamental question: where does the human capacity for violence come from? The answer cannot be reduced to individual morality. Violence is also produced by culture, institutions, the state, economics and education. It must first be imagined, then legitimised, and finally made familiar.

This is why Guns and Games is ultimately less an exhibition about children than about adults. The children become a mirror in which society recognises itself. Their gazes ask: Who gave them these weapons? Who taught them to see them as toys? Who decided they should learn to fight before they learned the cost of violence?

After committing the first murder, Cain asks: “Am I my brother’s keeper?” The question remains with us. Violence begins not only with an act, but with the refusal to take responsibility for another. And if a child learns to hold a weapon before learning to ask these questions, the responsibility does not belong to the child.

It belongs to us."

‍

please explore the CATALOG OF THE EXHIBITION (to acquire the piece, please drop us a line to info@prometheus-art.com)

‍