Belfast Exposed

Exhibitions

3rd Aug - 16th Sep

Belfast Exposed Presents: Portrait of Belfast

BELFAST EXPOSED PRESENTS: PORTRAIT OF BELFASTTo accompany Portrait of Humanity Vol. 5, Belfast Exposed is inviting Northe...

Read More
3rd Aug - 16th Sep

Portrait of Humanity Vol. 5

In partnership with the British Journal of PhotographyBelfast Exposed is delighted to be hosting the British Journal of P...

Read More

Community

21st May - 22nd May

Showing the faces of dementia with Alzheimer’s NI

Ahead of the Alzheimer’s Society Annual Conference 2019 (ASAC19), Belfast Exposed was commissioned by Alzheimer’s NI to w...

Read More
4th May - 20th May

Coronation Generation 2023

Bringing together young people from across communities for Coronation GenerationIn April 2023, Belfast Exposed worked wit...

Read More

67/89

Gallery 1

1st Aug 2002 to 12th Sep 2002

About The Exhibition

67/89 by Kai-Olaf Hesse is a series of images referring to site-specific incidents, relating to an era of radical political agitation in Cold War Germany. The latest in a programme of exhibitions presented by Belfast Exposed, largely focusing on cities with historical experience of civil and political unrest, and considering ways of reading the past within contemporary urban landscapes.

Beginning with late 1960s student and left anti imperialist protest against military intervention in Vietnam by the US and its western allies, Hesse's images refer to sites of mass demonstrations in the face of violent state reaction. During the 1970s mass mobilisation for political action declined in western societies. Here, Hesse's images refer to the actions of armed groups, such as Baader-Meinhof, who saw themselves as an elite vanguard against capitalism, provoking the German state to violent reaction, which would in turn re-awaken mass political consciousness. 67/89 finally records a return to public participation in anti state protest during the 1980s, centred on the USA/USSR arms race and proliferation of nuclear weapons.

Last summer Belfast Exposed showed Afterwars by Israeli photographer, Ori Gersht, a series of architectural portraits taken in and around Sarajevo in the aftermath of the Bosnian war. Earlier this summer we commissioned and exhibited Peter Richard's Memorial, which recorded and examined the function of memorials to conflict around Belfast. At this stage of the peace process in Northern Ireland, there is heightened public interest and concern over how conflict is remembered. We hope through our gallery programme to make a small contribution to an important on going debate. Interestingly, where Afterwars and Memorials documented very public responses, 67/89 highlights the absence of public memorial to incidents, which in their time seemed to hold wide, international significance, but whose meaning through time, has become submerged.

Signifying an individual act of remembrance, 67/89 raises questions about the nature of historical memory, suggesting that at each layering of history, choices have to be made between what will be obliterated, what preserved; what remembered and what forgotten.

The Artists

Kai-Olaf Hesse

Acknowledgements

Belfast Exposed would like to acknowledge the support of Belfast City Council, the NI Arts Council and the Ormeau Baths Gallery.