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On Conflict, Memory and Commemoration
12 September, 2012
On Conflict, Memory and Commemoration
Wednesday 31st October @Belfast Exposed
10am – 4pm
A seminar exploring issues of visual storytelling and testimony and how photographers and artists may get beyond reportage, to the heart of community stories and experience.
Part of Belfast Exposed’s “Where are the People?” development and research programme, supported through Paul Hamlyn Foundation’s Our Museum Initiative.
The post conflict years have been a time for looking back, trying to work through unresolved problems or come to terms with the past. All too often the process of looking back has been unsettling and has distracted us from the important business of visualizing the kind of society we want for the future. In focussing on the past, we may also be excluding new communities from view.
The decade of historical commemorations that lies ahead will once again raise tensions and challenges, but in re-telling the past imaginatively, can we discover ways of seeing the present more clearly and thinking anew about the future?
Over the years, artists and photographers, working individually or with communities, have explored these questions and tried to discover ways of representing community experience of conflict and commemoration. Much of this work has made a difference to those involved or encountering it. Some has gone on to win international recognition and acclaim. And yet many still remain uncertain about the relevance of contemporary art and photography as a way of telling stories and representing community experience, sometimes feeling that the work is challenging and remote or that somehow the gallery places it ‘out of bounds’ to communities and the non arts public.
This seminar invites artists, communities, activists and interested members of the public to come together to discuss the rewards, benefits, challenges and limitations of arts projects that seek to express social or political purpose.
The purpose of the seminar is to discover imaginative ways in which community experience and arts practice can resonate with each other as we move into the Decade of Commemorations. We hope to spark off some fruitful collaborations between artists and communities interested in developing new projects involving Northern Ireland’s diverse range of communities.
The seminar will consist of three case studies followed by Question and Answers in the morning. After lunch we will host a series of practical workshops aimed at supporting collaborative projects involving artists and communities.
Confirmed contributors to date – Paul Seawright (Artist and Professor of Photography at the University of Ulster) Golden Thread Gallery/ Draw Down the Walls, Eugenie Dolberg (author Open Shutters Iraq)
Full speaker list to be confirmed.
Places free (+ £5 contribution for lunch)
To book and for further information contact Belfast Exposed
The Exchange Place, 23 Donegall Street, Belfast, BT1 2FF
Tel. +44 (0) 28 9023 0965
E. info@belfastexposed.org