Sites of Unlearning: Encountering Perforated Ground Through Photographic Practice
- Submitting institution
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University of Portsmouth
- Unit of assessment
- 32 - Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory
- Output identifier
- 26321753
- Type
- T - Other
- DOI
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- Location
- -
- Brief description of type
- A multi-component output consisting of visual artefacts, exhibitions and a journal article supported by contextual information.
- Open access status
- -
- Month
- November
- Year
- 2019
- URL
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- Supplementary information
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- Request cross-referral to
- -
- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- -
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
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0
- Research group(s)
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- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- This is a practice-led photography project created between 2014-2018. It is a MULTI-COMPONENT output consisting of visual artefacts, exhibitions and a journal article supported by contextual information, submitted via USB which can be requested from the REF archive.
The project explored various artistic methods in analogue and digital photography and printmaking, using laser engraving and traditional relief printing processes, sound, video and installation. Whilst photography is often read in terms of its indexical referent, this project subverts the ways in which we decipher meaning. The images operate as visual triggers, activating connotations originating from dominant political contexts, informed and maintained by state apparatuses. Surveillance, access restrictions and hospitality and hostility encountered in the landscape, often in response to gender and national identity, are emphasised by the works and the photographic gaze.
It investigates personal and political narratives, identity formations and collective memories shaped by violent historical and political events through traces left in the landscape and made visible by photography. The works developed through multiple trips to Israel, Palestine, Germany and the UK, which enabled insights from visits to sites and the printing process to inform the treatment of works from different geopolitical landscapes. This process aimed to examine conflict and political violence through wider historical and contemporary perspectives that are not restricted to the Middle East but are also shaped by and encountered in the West. Cultural and political narratives, the artist’s own entangled biography and the material sites of making are weaved together to create ‘sites of unlearning’.
The work developed through material explorations, reflective writing and dissemination of work through publication and curation of exhibitions in the UK & Israel. The exhibitions were ‘sites for unlearning’, where learning to unlearn was provoked by the detours, translations and propositions offered by the decontextualisation and repositioning of photographic works.
- Author contribution statement
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- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
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