This panel brings artist Emily Graham into conversation with artist and writer David Birkin. Graham will expand on her project The Palace, on display at this year’s edition of Peckham 24, as well as her broader photographic practice. Using nuclear semiotics as a starting point, The Palace considers how and what we leave behind for future generations. Situated between representation and abstraction, the work explores our cultures of memorialisation, the quest for a universal visual language, and our future archaeologies: what we might communicate over the abyss of deep time. Through the lens of aerial photography, David Birkin will share excerpts from his PhD which traces histories of aerial violence and acts of resistance, disarmament, lawfare, and counter-forensics: from a group of Welsh poets who burned down a Royal Air Force base in 1936, to the women who destroyed a British Aerospace fighter jet in 1996, to the recent hunger strikes, trials, and proscription of Palestine Action. The conversation will be moderated by writer, curator, and artist Amin Yousefi.
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Emily Graham is an artist working primarily with colour photography. Her practice often deals with elusive subject matter; a search for the unknown, a psychological state, or the act of communication and interpretation. She is interested in creating a loose, expressive form of documentation that leaves room for subjective interpretations, embracing the suggestive and metaphorical potential of photographs.
David Birkin is an artist and Senior Lecturer in Photography at University of the Arts London (LCC) where he co-founded the research hub Visible Justice, which is currently in residence at the ICA. Combining archival photographic practices with large-scale performances in public space, much of Birkin’s work centres on state violence, its language, and legal frameworks. Past projects include a collaboration with the courtroom sketch artist at Guantánamo, skywriting above Manhattan, and a plane circling the Statue of Liberty’s torch. He has written for Frieze, Ibraaz, Cabinet, Creative Time, and the American Civil Liberties Union blog on subjects ranging from a legally protected species of iguana to Marilyn Monroe’s 1945 photoshoot at an army drone factory. Birkin studied at the University of Oxford, Slade School of Fine Art, and Whitney Museum Independent Study Program in New York. He is completing a PhD in Visual Cultures at the Centre for Research Architecture, Goldsmiths, and is a Visiting Fellow in Art History at the University of Cambridge.
Amin Yousefi is a London-based writer, curator, and image-based artist. A native of Abadan in Khuzestan, an oil-rich region shaped by the Iran–Iraq war and its aftermath, Yousefi’s work examines the event of photography through its social and political dimensions. It considers how the medium might unsettle conventional understandings of the archive. He is Assistant Curator and Editor of Photography+ at Photoworks UK, where he contributes to the development of exhibitions, commissions, and public programmes across photography and lens-based media. His curatorial work engages questions of image circulation, archival politics, and the conditions through which meaning is produced in exhibition contexts.