On Thursday 9 July, the Bastogne War Museum will host the opening of the Art of Remembrance exhibition, a contemporary art exhibition exploring the legacy of the Second World War. From 10 July, the exhibition will be open to the public until 23 August, before travelling to its final venue, La Coupole Museum, in France. Bringing together artists Rebekka Bauer, Raphaël Dallaporta, Juhana Moisander and Gail Ritchie, the show presents works born from residencies undertaken at several European memorial sites offering visitors a sensitive, intimate new way to engage with history.
The exhibition can also be discovered online here.
For those wishing to attend the opening evening in Bastogne, the programme runs as follows: doors open at 18:00 at the Bastogne War Museum (Colline du Mardasson, 5, 6600 Bastogne), followed at 18:15 by speeches and a presentation of the project. At 18:30, visitors can tour the exhibition alongside artists Raphaël Dallaporta and Gail Ritchie, before the evening closes with a convivial drink at 19:00. Registration is required via this link.
The Bastogne War Museum as a Residency Site
As one of the project’s partner institutions, the Bastogne War Museum welcomed artist Raphaël Dallaporta for an extended residency, opening its archives, its expertise and the surrounding Ardennes landscape to his research. Situated in a region where military history and stories of warfare loom large, the museum also offered a rare space to slow down, dig into local memory, and search for the quieter, often overlooked traces the war left behind, in the forests, the soil, and the land itself.
Raphaël Dallaporta: Listening to the Environment
During his residency, Raphaël Dallaporta turned to the Ardennes landscape itself, asking what remains once human witnesses are gone. Trees became his central subject: silent, living presences carrying history within their own matter. At the Bois du Beleu, he photographed two centuries-old conifers still bearing the scars of the fire caused by the launch of the first operational V2 rocket on 8 September 1944. At the Bois Jacques battlefield, he documented the improvised memorial crosses that visitors continue to build from fallen branches, an anonymous and ongoing ritual of remembrance. Working closely with the museum’s team and local experts, Dallaporta also drew on archival material, including a 1945 aerial photograph of Bizory, to explore how distance and perspective shape our view of history. Across each piece, his work seeks to make a once-traumatised landscape inhabitable again, witnessed not through battle, but through matter, time, and quiet remembrance ritual.
