Memory and the City: Contemporary Photographic Practice in Belfast

AHRC Collaborative Doctoral Award – Sarah Tuck

Belfast Exposed Gallery and Birmingham Institute of Art and Design

To consider contemporary photographic practice post the Good Friday Agreement (1998) and its relation to the lived experience of the conflict and construction of memory and post memory, foregrounding the city space as both landscape and cartography of the conflict. Working in collaboration with Belfast Exposed Gallery the research project investigates the relationship of contemporary photography to the duty of memory and ideas of justice. Drawing on the work of Paul Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting (2004) the research considers how photographic practice questions the attribution of pathos (remembrance) and praxis (recollection) as a navigation of memory and post-memory and as a resistance to the effacement of the spectral and mnestic trace

In exploring the work of photographers Paul Seawright, Mary McIntyre, Ronnie Close, Donovan Wylvie, Claudio Hils, Broomberg and Chanarin, Kai Olaf Hesse, Willie Doherty, David Farrell and Sylvia Grace Borda the research considers how contemporary practice opens up new experiences of memory and mourning against the exactitude of the photographic archive of the conflict.

Drawing on Derrida’s definition of hauntology, the research considers how the ‘archival turn ‘ of contemporary photography  with its emphasis on mapping the spectrality of the conflict within the city, emerges at the conjunction of a series of public debates on the politics of the memorial and on appropriate forms of public mourning.  As such the research considers if contemporary photographic practice can be seen to embody an alternative form of remembrance, as opposed to the official rhetoric of the figurative and the monument.The research seeks to address how the hauntological as metaphor, trope and the politics of remembrance  is mobilised as a means through which to affect a more personal relationship with the past reconnecting the duty of memory to the ideas of justice  by reinstalling the particularities of memory work and of memorative identity in the city.

To address these questions the research design draws upon precedents in curatorial practice, activism and action research that provides for a collectivisation of the research enquiry.

The publics and purpose of the research is addressed through the methodological approach utilised, providing for a range of practitioners, community activists and academics to  inform, shape and contest the research – its premise, emergent findings and summative analysis.  

If you have any enquiries about the research or would like to be involved please contact Sarah Tuck – sarahltuck@gmail.com