Sites of Collective Memory

Really pleased to share that Sites of Collective Memory, a show I co-curated with Gary at Animate, is now online and at CGP London until 10 August. It’s been a real delight working with all five artists on realising these projects over the last couple of years and always a wonderful moment when the work is launched out into the world.

Each work takes testimony as its starting point, reflecting on personal experiences of iconic and historic moments:

In Little Boy, named after the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima in the Second World War, Jordan Baseman reflects on the personal recollection of a Japanese survivor of the blast to consider the momentous impact that the first use of nuclear weapons has had on humanity since.

Roz Mortimer incorporates the testimonies of elderly villagers, with footage of the traces left on the landscape where former mass graves once lay, to bring to life the stories of genocide in southern Poland in This is History (after all).

In 216 Westbound, Shona Illingworth presents a portrait of a survivor of the 7/7 London bombings, contrasted with the media’s appropriation of an image of his bloodied face captured at the event, which has since become an iconic image of both advocacy and remembrance.

Delaine Le Bas and Damian James Le Bas reveal tales told by the artists’ relatives of suspected witches and encountered ghosts in CHUVIHONI, pictured above. These supernatural yarns, shared by family members at funeral vigils, bind together memories of places and people in the minds of the living.