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 a visual artist and writer. He is a Senior Lecturer teaching Photojournalism and Documentary Photography at London College of Communication. David is the co-founder of Visible Justice, a transdisciplinary research platform for artists, activists, journalists, photographers, and human rights lawyers working at the intersection of visual culture and social justice. Combining conceptual and archival photographic practices with large scale interventions into public space, much of David's work reflects on the legacies of imperialism, representations of war, and the apparatus of state power: its mythology, iconography, and the language and legal frameworks that underpin it. At its core is a concern for censorship and the edges of visibility, often focusing on omissions, redactions, glitches, or slips in the smooth surface of a political system to disclose a deeper ideological drive.
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.