“Let the Atrocious Images Haunt Us”—Encounters with Conflict and Connection in Visual Art-Making

Alison Rouse

doi:10.1177/1940844720948075

Abstract

In the relative comfort of my UK living room, a passive spectator of TV news, I watch fleeting images of appalling suffering and devastation emanating from the war in Syria. The coverage of the bombing of Aleppo (2015) is heart-rending. I turn to art in response, to slow the disappearance of visual images and to counter my sense of remove. This begins as self-activism, drawing/painting-as-inquiry, in combination with journal writing. As the work progresses, portraits burst out of the sketchbook and claim space to speak for themselves, demanding a place in the wider world, their own artivism. What they communicate to each viewer will vary—a commentary on war, on a country’s response to migration, or a call to action for what might be different? The inquiry moves through personal and cultural layers of a creative process to question what art does, and what it fails to do, in the context of this project and activism. Art’s potential, through the acts of looking and making, to affect is central to the sequence of encounters (connections and disconnections), which are examined here.

Highlights

International Review of Qualitative Research 00(0)“... the picture is transformed into an internal vision that takes on a life of its own
I can only comment from outside, the responses of a distant witness to the harrowing carnage. Is it right that I should do this? The reality of the lived experience is filtered before it reaches me—the individuals caught up in such horrors are re-presented through the cameras and words of the journalist-reporters, and transmitted to me through a screen in a distant country, far removed from the realities of life in a war zone
Are there ways in which the paintings can communicate the experience of their subjects more effectively, affectively, opening up connections? Bourriaud (1998) theorizes relational esthetics as art practice, where art becomes the production of encounters between people, rather than between viewer and object

Summary

Introduction

International Review of Qualitative Research 00(0)“... the picture is transformed into an internal vision that takes on a life of its own. The act of painting a portrait is different to taking a photograph in that it requires a more sustained process of looking and embodied activity.

Results

Conclusion