Academic Sessions: London 2003
War, Community and Visual Culture
Convenors:
Gabriel Koureas, Birkbeck and Angela Weight, Curator of the Department of Art at the Imperial War Museum, and the Group for War and Culture Studies at the University of Westminster.
Send proposals to: g.koureas@btinternet.com
Abstract:
In wars of the twentieth century, the ‘imagined community’ of the nation–state was often in tension with actual communities forged in response to conflict: colonial troops within the Allied forces; occupying troops and local inhabitants; refugees of many nationalities fleeing together; prisoners–of–war who shared no common language with their fellow inmates; the wounded of both sides in the same hospital ward; people of all ages and all classes descending into the London underground every night of the Blitz; the drastically changed social composition of the armed forces in wartime. While some new collective identities created by images of social cohesion were used as propaganda, some were censored or remained little known. Focusing on what joined people together in war and how these new configurations were and are represented in visual culture, this session will seek to address the following questions: What do wartime images and objects reveal about attitudes to, for example, male bonding in the forces, communities that ignored peacetime divisions of class and race, or the new prominence of women living and working together on the land, in hospitals or the munitions factories? What visual records exist but have been suppressed ior ignored, and why? What was the role of museums in the memory and commemoration of war? What were the implications in the postwar period of seeing representations of new communities that transcended barriers of race, class and gender? How have these identities and relationships been articulated in visual culture?
Jonathan Blackwood (University of Glamorgan) Local Defence Volunteer: The Painting and Criticism of Edward Baird, 1939–45.
Graham Dawson (University of Brighton) Trauma, Postmemory, Place: Bloody Sunday, Derry 1972–2003.
Simon Dell (University of East Anglia) The Apocalypse of Fraternity: The Spanish Civil War and the Image of the Popular Front in France.
Paul Gough (University of West of England) Creating Communities of Peace, Protest and Intervention.
Sharon Lowenna(Falmouth College of Arts) Missing in Action: the Newlyn School and the Anglo–Boer War, 1899–1902.
Veronica Davies (University of East London) From Active Service to Collaboration: Reconstructing the German Art World in the British Zone.
Chin-tao Wu (UCL and Nanhua University, Taiwan) Missing Presumed Dead: Absence and Remembrance in the work of Doris Salcedo.
Gabriel Koureas, Birkbeck and Angela Weight, Curator of the Department of Art at the Imperial War Museum, and the Group for War and Culture Studies at the University of Westminster.
Send proposals to: g.koureas@btinternet.com
Abstract:
In wars of the twentieth century, the ‘imagined community’ of the nation–state was often in tension with actual communities forged in response to conflict: colonial troops within the Allied forces; occupying troops and local inhabitants; refugees of many nationalities fleeing together; prisoners–of–war who shared no common language with their fellow inmates; the wounded of both sides in the same hospital ward; people of all ages and all classes descending into the London underground every night of the Blitz; the drastically changed social composition of the armed forces in wartime. While some new collective identities created by images of social cohesion were used as propaganda, some were censored or remained little known. Focusing on what joined people together in war and how these new configurations were and are represented in visual culture, this session will seek to address the following questions: What do wartime images and objects reveal about attitudes to, for example, male bonding in the forces, communities that ignored peacetime divisions of class and race, or the new prominence of women living and working together on the land, in hospitals or the munitions factories? What visual records exist but have been suppressed ior ignored, and why? What was the role of museums in the memory and commemoration of war? What were the implications in the postwar period of seeing representations of new communities that transcended barriers of race, class and gender? How have these identities and relationships been articulated in visual culture?
Jonathan Blackwood (University of Glamorgan) Local Defence Volunteer: The Painting and Criticism of Edward Baird, 1939–45.
Graham Dawson (University of Brighton) Trauma, Postmemory, Place: Bloody Sunday, Derry 1972–2003.
Simon Dell (University of East Anglia) The Apocalypse of Fraternity: The Spanish Civil War and the Image of the Popular Front in France.
Paul Gough (University of West of England) Creating Communities of Peace, Protest and Intervention.
Sharon Lowenna(Falmouth College of Arts) Missing in Action: the Newlyn School and the Anglo–Boer War, 1899–1902.
Veronica Davies (University of East London) From Active Service to Collaboration: Reconstructing the German Art World in the British Zone.
Chin-tao Wu (UCL and Nanhua University, Taiwan) Missing Presumed Dead: Absence and Remembrance in the work of Doris Salcedo.