To commemorate the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of World War II and to keep the idea of peace alive, a new poster is created every year. This year's poster will be added to the exhibition on August 9.
The Japan Graphic Designers Association and the International Hiroshima Cultural Foundation launched the "Spirit of Hiroshima" project in 1983, creating posters to commemorate and honor those who died in the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and to promote peace at home and abroad. The project continued annually until 1989 and resumed after a break in 2005 to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the Second World War.
Today, the exhibition travels and reaches out to the public in Europe and worldwide. The idea of peace and its value is one of the key messages for society at this time, and should be spoken in all possible languages, the exhibition's curator in Latvia ilze Dobele says.
It is 79 years since the Second World War and the atomic bombs were dropped on Japan. In these decades, at least three generations have still been looking for ways to avoid war.
Ilze Dobele said: "I think that's why this exhibition is extremely important, because it captures not just the idea of peace, which we now understand in a completely different way, but that we also see this peace and the need for peace in a more global, much bigger sense, that war, which we didn't think could happen at all, as a kind of ordinary war, is happening today, is happening with different hybrid methods. [..] These people have also included it in their work - that no one should experience what they have experienced. I think that's why it's important to talk about this kind of vision of artists, and also about peace in general because I think it's very important at this moment."
The National Library of Latvia also has posters on the theme of peace, created in the 1970s and 1980s by such well-known artists as Laimonis Šēnbergs, Frančeska Kirke, Gunārs Kirke, Vadims Ivanovs, Ilmārs Blumbergs and others. Therefore, the library would like to bring out the poster genre as a concise and powerful means of artistic expression in public space.
