After passing by colossal artillery pieces in the large permanent galleries of the Imperial War Museum, one arrives in the temporary exhibition space on the second floor, currently dedicated to the artistic responses of British women to 20th-century military conflicts. The IWM’s works are hung thematically in five rooms, which explore recordings of everyday life during war times, women’s involvement in the war machinery, the war zones and encounters with war atrocities.

The visitor is drawn into the first room by the laughing, working-class women in Flora Lion’s painting Women’s Canteen of 1918, depicted, as the label points out, at one of ‘their first opportunities to enjoy a regular meal.’ Next to it, Laura Knight’s 1943 painting celebrates Ruby Loftus, a young woman who became famous for making gun-breech rings, the most highly-skilled job in WWII weapons factories. Victoria Monk’s watercolours of women bus conductors and window cleaners emphasise this positive image of war as having heralded a departure from conventional class and gender roles on the home front. As in the next rooms, the wall texts are indispensable in pointing out that the women depicted were in fact rare cases in a male-dominated war context, as were the female artists. Not until 1982 was the first woman artist commissioned to work in the theatre of war; accompanying the Task Force, Linda Kitson captured the Falklands conflict in rapid reportage drawings.

The display moves away from the direct representation of war with Frauke Eigen’s 2002 Kosovo Series, disturbing black-and-white photographs of clothes exhumed from mass graves. The exhibition ends in a blind alley where Mona Hatoum’s film Measures of Distance (1988) draws together intimate themes of womanhood and sexuality, showing the naked body of her mother overlaid with text from her letters to her daughter, who was separated from her family during the Lebanese Civil War.

Until Jan 8

JULIA BISCHOFF