Professor Stefanie Kappler stefanie.kappler@durham.ac.uk
Professor
‘Post-Conflict Curating’: the Arts and Politics of Belfast’s Peace Walls
Kappler, Stefanie; McKane, Antoinette
Authors
Antoinette McKane
Abstract
This article conceptualises the challenges that curators of the visual arts working in post-conflict contexts face in terms of doing justice to the competing narratives and representations of past violence. To do so, the article first proposes the concept of the city-as-museum, in which independent artists and residential communities may act as curators as much as museum professionals and state organisations do. Against this background, the article goes on to consider the particular curatorial issues presented by the context of “dark tourism” in places like Northern Ireland, where social conflict itself has become the subject of exhibition. We then zoom in on three Loyalist peace walls in Belfast to suggest that those walls have been curated to represent a particular vision of a post-conflict society. We examine recent developments in mural production that have emerged alongside the site’s popularity as a “pleasurable” experience for visitors to the city. We suggest that this tension between the Troubles and the visitor’s experience generates a discourse on its own that is translated in the kind of wall monument that is created. In that sense, we can, for instance, view the murals in Belfast as sites of creative art on the one hand, and as political visions of the future of the city and region on the other hand. We cast light on the continued significance of the murals as expressions of community identities, and examine their ability to promote narratives of both division and tolerance between communities in the post-conflict city.
Citation
Kappler, S., & McKane, A. (2019). ‘Post-Conflict Curating’: the Arts and Politics of Belfast’s Peace Walls. de arte, 54(2), 4-21. https://doi.org/10.1080/00043389.2019.1613747
Journal Article Type | Article |
---|---|
Acceptance Date | Nov 13, 2018 |
Online Publication Date | Aug 16, 2019 |
Publication Date | 2019 |
Deposit Date | Nov 14, 2018 |
Publicly Available Date | Feb 16, 2021 |
Journal | De arte. |
Print ISSN | 0004-3389 |
Electronic ISSN | 2471-4100 |
Publisher | Taylor and Francis Group |
Peer Reviewed | Peer Reviewed |
Volume | 54 |
Issue | 2 |
Pages | 4-21 |
DOI | https://doi.org/10.1080/00043389.2019.1613747 |
Public URL | https://durham-repository.worktribe.com/output/1314113 |
Files
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Copyright Statement
This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in de arte on 16 August 2019 available online: http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/00043389.2019.1613747
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