In the face of inhumanity, artists can bear witness and commemorate, bringing painful issues to the surface, both personally and publicly.

In the Belligerents section for the Nationalists, you can see the 'Army of Af. Heart of Spain is the first volume to be devoted entirely to the finest of Robert Capas photographs from the Spanish Civil War (1936-39) and features many. Malangatana Ngwenya’s dense weave of images evokes his experience during the war of liberation from Portuguese rule in Mozambique. Spanish Sahara, Cape Juby, the exclave of Ifni, Spanish Guinea, Spanish Morocco (as seen on the map) and the Canary islands (included because they are also not shown) all had governors or colonial guard commanders who supported the Nationalist rebellion. The process of decolonisation in the second half of the century was rarely peaceful and often marked by especial bitterness. By contrast, Peter de Francia’s The Execution of Beloyannis 1953–4 is rooted in realism but powerfully expressive, depicting a brutal killing in the aftermath of the Greek Civil War. Mexican artist David Alfaro Siqueiros turned to abstraction to articulate his despair at the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War. The Spanish Civil War of 1936–9 had a particularly powerful impact in Europe and the wider Spanish- speaking world to which exiles fled. The twentieth century was marked by a number of civil wars that set neighbours and families against one another.

In times of war, art has long been a means of protesting against suffering and also of remembering the dead. The works in this room find visual expression for the complex horrors of civil war

Map of spanish civil war