The art of war: women artists at Imperial War Museum - in pictures

In Flora Lion’s Women’s Canteen at Phoenix Works, Bradford (1918), munitions workers are seen as a sisterhood of bold, independent young women Photograph: Imperial War Museum

Ruby Loftus Screwing a Breech-Ring (1943) is a classic propaganda portrait by Laura Knight, showing a second world wartime role model for young women. Note the staple hairnet and overalls
Photograph: Imperial War Museum

At the end of the second world war, Knight sought permission to paint the trials of the major war criminals. In The Nuremberg Trial (1946) she departed from her realist style and incorporated the smouldering, nightmarish ruins of the Bavarian city itself into the court scene Photograph: Imperial War Museum

Evelyn Mary Dunbar's The Queue at the Fish Shop (1944) is a quirky, Hopperesque portrait of life in her home town during the second world war. Fish was never rationed because of its perishable nature – but it was still highly sought-after Photograph: Imperial War Museum

In 1944, Doris Zinkeisen was commissioned by the Red Cross and St John Joint War Organisation to record their work in north-west Europe – one of the very few women artists sent overseas. She visited Bergen-Belsen concentration camp soon after its liberation. Here, in Human Laundry (1945), she painted the stark, overt contrast between the rounded bodies of the carers and the emaciated former prisoners. But it is the orderly, almost industrial quality of this washing process that underlines the patients’ dehumanised condition Photograph: Imperial War Museum

Mary Kessell’s vigorous charcoal and sanguine drawings deal with the plight of the German people after the second world war. Intense, memorable images of homeless refugee women and children in Berlin in 1945 – such as Waiting for the Train on the Anhalter Bahnhof – show the immediate results of the Allied invasion
Photograph: Imperial War Museum

Linda Kitson became the first official female war artist to accompany troops into action during the Falklands conflict in 1982, and her sketches – including Welsh Guardsmen from the Bridge (19 May 1982) – were often completed at speed in hostile conditions Photograph: Imperial War Museum

Untitled May 1991 explores Jananne Al-Ani’s reaction to the Gulf war. The photographs show – in rows from the top – Iraqi archaelogical artefacts, family photographs, professional portraits and media images of the conflict. The arrangement juxtaposes individual histories and collective heritage with the local input Al-Ani felt was missing from media portrayals Photograph: Imperial War Museum

Photojournalist Frauke Eigen made her first trip to Kosovo in 2000 and witnessed the exhumation of a mass grave. In her portfolio of photographs Fundstücke Kosovo (Kosovo Finds) she evokes the memory of the victims of ethnic cleansing by capturing their personal effects, giving a visceral sense of their absence – as in Uhr (Watch) Photograph: Imperial War Museum

Unterhemd (Vest), another from Eigen's Fundstücke Kosovo series, prompts us to consider the fate of the person to whom the ruined garment once belonged Photograph: Imperial War Museum

Turner prize nominee Mona Hatoum grew up as a Palestinian in Lebanon, and was separated from her family by the outbreak of the Lebanese civil war which forced her to remain in London. Her early work Measures of Distance (1988) shows Hatoum reading letters exchanged between herself and her mother in English and Arabic during their separation, opening up an intimate dialogue about womanhood that draws together themes of exile, separation and identity Photograph: Imperial War Museum