The paper’s aim is to analyse the representation of works of Jenny Holzer’s Redaction Paintings series in the context of building a collective memory. Taking into account the relationship between art and memory, I research how this relationship operates in the above example. The subject of the series are the declassified documents of the American government regarding military operations in the Middle East which the artist made into paintings by transferring them onto the canvass and adding colour. This transfer of the war narrative from the field of politics into art makes it possible to go beyond the fixed framework of memory and shape it anew. The artist’s polemics with ready-made patterns of remembering imposed by the government and the media facilitates the reflection not so much on the discourse as on the framework within which is it legitimised.