From the Archives: “War, Media and The New World Order" by David Tomas, 1991

War, Media, and The New World Order ​poster by David Tomas (1950 - 2019) for the fax and photocopy exhibition at The Centre International d’Art Contemporain de Montréal (CIAC), 1991. Image Courtesy of the Estate of David Tomas.

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This poster is from an anti-war exhibition held in Montréal in 1991, which David Tomas and Jamelie Hassan organized together with scholars Jody Berland and Will Straw in response to the the first Gulf War - Operation Desert Storm. Dave was a Montreal-based artist and had strong connections with London artists including Kim Moodie, Jamelie Hassan and Ron Benner throughout the 1980's and early 1990's. He also was included in the international project Travelling Theory co-curated by Fern Bayer and Jamelie Hassan, which was held at the Jordan National Gallery of Fine Arts in Amman, Jordan and the McIntosh Gallery at Western University in London, Ontario, Canada in 1991.

David Tomas’ poster was inspired by the iconic painting, “The Scream” by Norwegian artist Edvard Munch, 1893.

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Response from the ECH community:

Thanks for sharing this image. I remember that exhibit so well. There was a lot of political mobilization in Montréal in 1990-1991. The siege of Kanesatake happened in summer 1990. Caravans of activists traveled to Oka daily to support the Mohawk resistance. Dave had done a video piece that addressed “the Oka crisis.” Less than a year later, protests against Operation Desert Storm filled Boulevard René-Lévesque in Montréal in Spring 1991. The post-cold war era began with those acts of state violence. The conditions set in motion in those years have continued over the last 30 years, with what seems to be ever-increasing death and destruction. 
 
Even as his work looked back to the 19th and early 20th century, Dave was very much aware of the historical moment of the late 20th century and early 21st century. He was attentive to nuance, discerning in his assessment of situations, and a great conversationalist. One of our first talks was in London at your studio  [Jamelie Hassan] in the late 1980s. I don’t know if he was in London for Edward Said’s Tamblyn Lectures at Western, or if he was part of a show in London. 
 
I also recall on a visit to London or Toronto in the late 1980s going to an opening and seeing one of his pieces on exhibit that was a labyrinth of texts, quotations from Foucault and other theorists. We had a good long discussion about the piece that in my memory was cryptic, opaque, and perplexing;  I could not fully grasp what the work was doing, but sensed that Dave wanted to push the limits of signification and perception.
 
He was an erudite scholar as well as an artist, who like you [Jamelie Hassan] and Ron [Benner] read widely across the disciplines. His work tended toward the scientific, theoretical, technical, and in some ways so did his personality. He had a remarkable calmness, even when we disagreed. This drawing for the poster in some ways stands in contrast to how I remember his art, but is evocative of his critical relationship to art history. 
 
He was always very generous and showed a genuine interest in my graduate studies at McGill during the late 1980s, when I think that he was just finishing his PhD.  He also was encouraging when he learned that I was going to the University of Texas to do my PhD with Barbara Harlow. Before leaving Montréal for Austin in August 1992, I visited Dave a few times at his home in the Vieux Port. I never saw him again after that summer. 
 
Warmly,
Salah D. Hassan
Director of Global Studies in the Arts and Humanities Program
​at Michigan State University, Lansing, MI, USA

Received May 19, 2022

Editor's note: David Tomas' video on the 1990 Oka crisis is titled Rum and Coca-Cola, 1992,
​17 minutes, English and French, distributed by V Tape, Toronto

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For more information on David Tomas' life and work, please visit his website here.