On September 15 and 16, imageandpeace participated in the 13th edition of the conference on Popular Culture and World Politics – New (A)venues – in Magdeburg, Germany.
Exhibition Review: Currency – Photography Beyond Capture
What happens after Cartier-Bresson’s decisive moment? Photographic images, this exhibition argues, “fundamentally shape acts of seeing and being seen.” Serving as “contextual frames for narrative invention,” photographs define to some extent what qualifies as knowledge. Photography produces knowledge but also confirms established ways of knowledge production by operating within established frames and conventions. In contrast, Currency – Photography Beyond Capture “looks at how … practitioners have challenged the meaning and value of photographic images and investigated the extended lives, temporalities, and materialities of image cultures beyond the moment of capture.”
‘Peace’ by Hermann Sebastian Schultz – New artwork on imageandpeace.com
Image & Peace proudly presents Peace by Hermann Sebastian Schultz, the fourth artwork commissioned by imageandpeace.com. Peace is a 4,5m x 1,75m oil painting accented with a sound installation made in collaboration with Santeri Pilli.
Guest contribution by Daniel Beck and Morgane Desoutter: Visual Peace in Kurdish Cinema
Kurdish cinema is often considered a typical case of ‘cinemas of conflict’ (Smets 2014) and in the common understanding, the Kurds themselves are generally associated with the idea of conflict. In our blog contribution1 we argue that films can offer views on Kurdish life outside of conflicts and thus contribute to peace. Our article examined how four Turkish–Kurdish films (Kilamek Ji Bo Beko, Güneşi Gördüm, Min Dît-The Children of Diyarbakır, and Meş) understand and represent the Kurdish Question, the Kurdish self, and the opposing other and how this influences the scope of plausible political behaviour. We highlight how both visualizations of negative and positive peace are present in the films, but also in what the films enable and produce.
Exhibition review – Susan Meiselas: Mediations
Alex Danchev and Debbie Lisle observed some years ago that ‘many artists are highly sophisticated analysts of the international sphere’ (2009, 775). In our recent article on appropriation as a method for visual analysis of the international, we therefore suggest understanding the scholar as image-maker and the image-maker as scholar (Möller, Bellmer, and Saugmann 2021).
A good example of the image-maker as scholar is Susan Meiselas whose work can currently be seen in the impressive retrospective Susan Meiselas: Mediations at C׀O Berlin (see also Meiselas 2018) covering a 50-year career.
Guest contribution by Alice König: St Andrews student team launches a virtual Museum of Peace
A lot of museum space has been dedicated to war. Libraries and bookshops contain countless volumes of military history. Most of us can think of multiple war films. There are well-established traditions of war reporting and conflict photography. Peace, on the other hand…
Happy Midsummer: imageandpeace.com wishes a relaxing vacation season
Once again, politics and the media are dominated by images of confrontation, polarization, destruction, armed aggression, and human suffering – the whole sorry repertoire of failed attempts at peaceful conflict transformation of which we thought as a thing of the past, at least in Europe. Once again, however, war sidelines peace, war images sideline peace images.
Visual Peace – exhibition by Sebastian Schultz
Imageandpeace.com would like to direct your attention to the exhibition Visual Peace, displaying new paintings by Sebastian Schultz.
Exhibition review: Paradoxes of Photography
“Paradoxically, if you see an image as a photograph, it is a photograph – for you.” This is the idea inspiring the current exhibition at the Finnish Museum of Photography: “An image endowed with a photographic look is easily thought of as evidence of a presence in front of a camera, even though it may result from computational processes.”
New Publication: “Looking at War and Peace – The Visual Representation of Bosnia and Herzegovina” with Südosteuropa Mitteilungen
Südosteuropa Mitteilungen is the leading bi-monthly German-language journal on politics, culture, economics, and society of south-eastern Europe. We are happy to announce publication of an article titled ‘Bilder von Frieden und Krieg betrachten – Die visuelle Darstellung von Bosnien und Herzegowina’ / ‘Looking at War and Peace – The Visual Representation of Bosnia and Herzegovina’ (Vol. 62, No. 2, pp. 7–20).