On the occasion of the PEACE exhibition, the SCHIRN held a competition for a new PEACE logo. A jury chose these short-listed Top 5 out of 600 participants submitted entries.

From July 1 onwards the SCHIRN asks with its PEACE exhibition the question: So how does peace actually work today? In advance, it ran an international competition for a new PEACE logo. Suggestions were sought for a logo that represents our current notions of peace. An independent jury then selected the winning logo from among the 600-plus entries – it was in fact entered in parallel by two separate participants. The jury was made up of artists Marina Abramović and Britta Thie, designers Konstantin Grcic and Eike König, and the Managing Director of the Max Planck Foundation for International Peace and the Rule of Law, Tilmann Röder, and also compiled a short-list. Here we present the five short-listed participants, their personal PEACE logos and their individual explanations of the idea they had.

Bekata Ozdikmen (Turkey)

"What is World Peace? Global Peace - Universal Peace - Nonviolence Ideal... Today\‘s sense of peace is misleading, in its logic overwhelming individualism. World is limited to our own world. However, we should look at us, not me. We must bring peace to the whole world, not to mankind. We must remember that we can all exist together, and we must lift the boundaries of nature, peaceful, energetic, peace, language, religion and race. Because of this; The most dynamic form, the round, is enough to tell the world we live in, the blue clean world and peace."

Paul Müller (Germany)

"When the space probe Voyager 1 took a photo in 1990 of Earth from 6 billion kilometers out, all it that could be seen of it was a Blue Dot (Carl Sagan). Exactly that should therefore be the logo for peace on Earth. Nothing more than a blue dot. The symbol is universal in culture and the combination of the circle with the blue color is understood the world over as the Earth. The advantage of the blue dot is also that it can be used universally. It can be applied swiftly and with the simplest of means to any surface, and – this being especially important in the digital age – there’s already a corresponding emoji."

1., © Bekata Ozdikmen (Turkey) and Paul Müller (Germany)

2

Sandra Praun and Oscar Guermouche (Sweden)

"One of the most recognized peace symbols was designed in 1958 for the Nuclear Disarmament movement; it is a combination of the semaphore signals for the letters N and D. Since then the conditions have changed. 60 years later, we live with a more complex and changing threat: Islamist extremism, fascist movements, an increasingly uneven distribution of resources, rapidly changing alliances, environmental issues, migration, overpopulation. Despite the urgency of nuclear disarmament, the struggle for peace needs another focus. Our starting point was the original symbol and the principle of how it is built. In the circular shape the single letters look like a clock. We have turned it forward to what is needed for a peaceful society today, and also backward to what must be seen as the foundation of peace: tolerance towards different ethnicities, races, identities, bodies, cultures, and resistance against those forces that want to counteract this. Tolerance and Resistance."

2. , © Sandra Praun and Oscar Guermouche (Sweden)

3

Manuela Schirra (Italy)

"Pangea, the supercontinent of the past where borders and political geography were not there. The logo interprets peace as a union and collaboration towards a common good, a common aim, a common center. Starting from the image that in the universal imaginary interprets the world\‘s continents - the famous Olympic circles designed by De Coubertin in 1913 – it is generated the union of the parts to a single center. A co-operative, participated and varied circle to form a kind of nest. Movement and flow of peoples who are reiterating generating endless collaboration. In the logo, the circles – perfect prime figures – seek the union and the common aim denying the absolute perfection of the circle, thus accepting the compromise and therefore the coexistence and the peace. An image of union, evolution and protection, an idea of contemporary Pangea."

4

Nadja-Janina Isabella Büttner (Germany)

"I am a student of Tobias Rehberger at the Städelschule, and for the exhibition at the end of last year (2016) I created a sculpture with the title PEACE. This shows one hand with the index finger pointing admonishingly up into the air, and another showing a middle finger, with the two arranged one behind the other. In front of the sculpture there is a light source. Thus the shadow cast by both hands against the wall surprisingly shows the peace sign. I used this sculpture as the basis for the logo proposed here. The basic idea is that the shadow cast by two aggressive gestures (freedom of opinion) can produce one peaceful gesture (the main thrust). This can be understood as a warning that we should replace aggressive gestures by peaceful ones. From this, in the meantime, a kind of trademark has developed. As soon as you catch yourself showing an admonishing index finger or a middle finger, then the chain leads to the peace sign and thus eases the tension of a discussion and shows that it is actually meant peacefully."

4. , © Nadja-Janina Isabella Büttner (Germany)

5

Laura Saramok (Germany)

"Message: Peace is a movement and develops with the ideas of a huge variety of different persons and personalities. Peace is not sterile or limited, but rather something beautiful, colorful and limitless. Peace is not static, peace moves itself and others and spreads out like a wave. These days more than ever, people need to grasp the idea that peace can be developed TOGETHER. Hence I have created my logo as an animation that is composed of various different parts and inundates all the darkness with a shared power. This moving logo can take various forms; it consists of 180 frames and can thus consist of a maximum of 180 different forms."

5., © LAURA SARAMOK (GERMANY)