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Visual Cultures, Translocations of Nationhood and Formations of Identity

This cluster of research interests is focused on relationships between visual practices and the shifting formations of identity generated both within national space and through the translocational networks of migration, communication, and solidarity across political and ethnic boundaries. These concerns therefore address national, transnational and post-national contexts with regional focuses on the Caribbean and the UK, Israel / Palestine, and Ireland.

A further focus for these interests is the representation of conflict and the role of the visual within political processes. Here politics is understood to involve national struggles and their aftermaths as well contests that involve transitions from colonial to post-colonial situations. The consequences of these processes for formations of identity that can include gender, sexuality and ethnicity are also important sites of investigation.

Recent outputs

Archiving Place and Time: contemporary art from Northern Ireland since the Belfast Agreement, Holden Gallery, MMU; Millennium Court Arts Centre, Craigavon, NI; Wolverhampton Art Gallery, Nov-Dec 2009 (MMU) touring.

'After the War: Visual Culture in Northern Ireland since the Ceasefires', Routledge.

Timed out: Art and the Transnational Caribbean, Manchester University Press, 2010 (forthcoming).

'Alien Nation: Contemporary Art and Black Britain' in Ros Brunt and Rinella Cere eds. 2010 (forthcoming) Postcolonial Media Culture in Britain Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. ISBN: 0230545319

'Aubrey Williams: Atlantic Fire', in Reyahn King and The October Gallery eds. 2010 Aubrey Williams: Atlantic Fire National Museums Liverpool and October Gallery, London, pp. 46-55. ISBN: 978-1-899542-30-7. Exhibition catalogue essay.

Timed out: Art and the Transnational Caribbean, Manchester University Press, 2010 (forthcoming).

Visual practices and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict http://www.digitalartlab.org.il/Index.asp

'Late Photography, Military Landscapes, and the Politics of Memory' (in Hebrew)', in Larry Abramson and Oded Heilbronner (eds.) Contested Landscapes (forthcoming), Shenkar College, Ramat Gan, 2010

'Land, landscape and the wild zone of power', in Museum on the Seam, Jerusalem, 2009, pp. 235-244

'What Are You Looking At?', Programma. Tel Aviv, September 2009, pp. 128-136

'David Reeb: Painting Bil'in and elsewhere', Ma'arav, http://www.maarav.org.il/classes/PUItem.php?lang=ENG&id=1223

'Picturing the Oslo Process: Photography, Painting and the Belated Occupation'. In Hilde Van Gelder and Helen Westgeest (eds.) Photography Between Poetry and Politics: The Critical Position of the Photographic Medium in Contemporary Art, chapter 7, 103-121, Leuven University Press, 2008, pp. 103-121