Empire of Memory: Post-War Remembering and the Archive

Following on from the successful conference paper presentation (Event. Aftermath. Archive: The Unresolvable Past: Post-Conflict Trauma and Representation) at Pictures of War: The Still Image in Conflict since 1945 conference at Manchester Metropolitan University (25 May 2018). The exhibition shows the preliminary images, from the last years ww1 centenary commemoration. This text and archive material is a depiction of trauma through ‘post-memory’ reverberations of war and conflict. Finding novel ways to represent the unrepresentable (memory, history) is the current live debate in photojournalism, editorial documentary and art based practice. This ‘auto-ethnographic’ research (which is both textual and visual/practice) seeks to integrate these three approaches and use aesthetic devices to promote public debate on war, conflict and its aftermath. The exhibition includes photographs from the first world war alongside Clarkson’s own contemporary images, archive family photographs and video installations. Curated by Rowan Bailey with additional editing by Donal Fitzpatrick & Richard Higginbottom.