Art and contemporary visual culture are increasingly understood to affect practices of securitization and militarization in the post 9/11 world. In this context, state-commissioned war art becomes a loaded site since it is commonly understood as a particular means for reproducing nationalism. This paper, however, suggests that an in-depth study of this type of war art broadens critical reflection on contemporary gendered and nationalist war narratives and military deaths. Looking at the countries that participated in the ISAF mission in Afghanistan, Estonia stands out as exceptional due to its relative lack of counter-narratives to war discourse. As a diligent member of NATO, Estonia is invested in upholding a narrative of war that centres around Estonians as strong partners to the Alliance in the hope of strengthening its historically fragile sense of security. This paper argues that the state-sponsored artworks of Estonian artist Maarit Murka address the gendered myth of protection in provocative ways by simultaneously reproducing and destabilizing gendered and nationalist discourses of militarization and justifications for war in the era of post-national wars.

Redi Koobak is Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Centre for Women’s and Gender Research, University of Bergen, Norway. She holds a PhD from the Department of Thematic Studies – Gender Studies, Linköping University, Sweden. She has previously worked as Assistant Professor in Gender Studies at Linköping University, Sweden and as Visiting Lecturer in Feminist Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz, USA. In 2009-2012, she worked as the Editorial Secretary of NORA: Nordic Journal of Feminist and Gender Research (Taylor & Francis). Her current research interests include feminist visual culture studies; feminist and queer art; intersections of postcolonialism and postsocialism; cultural representations of gender, war and nationalism; transnational and local feminisms; and creative writing methodologies. Koobak is the author of the monograph Whirling Stories: Postsocialist Feminist Imaginaries and the Visual Arts (Linköping University Press, 2013). Her research has been published in Gender, Place and Culture, Feminist Theory, Feminist Review, European Journal of Women’s Studies, and Frontiers.

This is a single-authored paper based on research conducted within a larger Swedish Research Council funded project „The Politics of Military Loss in Contemporary Europe“, led by Cecilia Åse, Stockholm University.