Individual Submission Summary
Share...

Direct link:

Separate Centenaries: New Visual Memory of the Somme and the Easter Rising in Belfast

Mon, May 28, 11:00 to 12:15, Hilton Old Town, Floor: M, Haydn

Abstract

This paper explores the recent transformation of political murals in Belfast, Northern Ireland, amid a range of projects marking the 2016 centenaries of two events: the Easter Rising, and the Battle of the Somme during the First World War. Following other “re-imaging” public-art programs in this post-conflict city, some centenary murals have replaced violent imagery representing the more recent events of the Troubles, yet the new tributes resituate that conflict within a broader historical drama that is not over. In the city center, long-planned public-history exhibitions attempted to interpret the two events together as a “shared history”; in the outlying, sectarian neighborhoods, two separate histories unfolded anew on gable walls. This paper explores the ways in which this public embrace of a distant past, out of living memory, offered a set of new visual narratives that revivify events of living memory, rhetorically continuing conflict in a still-divided society.

Author