A father and son’s impressions of “The Troubles” in Northern Ireland, which deeply divided Catholic and Protestant communities, through photograph and song.

Steafán Hanvey

Wednesday, April 17, 2013

7:30-9pm in Salomon Hall

This event is free and open to the public. Please RSVP by emailing cctc@sandiego.edu.

The End of Art is Peace is a multi-media performance-lecture for international audiences that details how a father and son (both artists) have negotiated the personal and political landscapes of Northern Ireland. A melding of image and voice, anecdote and memory, it showcases Bobbie Hanvey’s prize-winning photojournalism along with radio-edits of his interviews with some of Northern Ireland’s best-known figures. These are complemented and contextualized by Steafán Hanvey’s story-telling, which comes in the form of critically-acclaimed song-writing, and a trained academic’s gift for presenting complex issues in an engaging manner.

Together, Bobbie and Steafán document the ordinary and at the same time the extraordinary – mums and dads, police and priests, the loved and the loveless, soldiers and paramilitaries, plain-folk and gentry, politicians and voters, poets, singers, painters, travelers  gathered around a fire on a cold winter’s morning, the living and the dead.

This performance is an invitation to engage with a project that strives to conflate the public and the private, and one which dares to promote Seamus Heaney’s claim that “the end of art is peace.”

Steafán Hanvey was born in Downpatrick, Co. Down, Ireland, five months after Bloody Sunday and one month before Bloody Friday. He graduated with a Bachelor’s in Modern Studies (Major: American Studies) in 1995 from The University of Ulster in Belfast. He spent his third year studying sound-engineering as an exchange student at Western Washington University; covered the IRA ceasefire as a sound engineer for Macmillan Media in Belfast, and then pursued a Masters in International Politics at the University of Helsinki.

Steafán has toured North America four times in the last three years. He has also been producing his second album, Nuclear Family, mixed by Tore Johansson (Franz Ferdinand/Cardigans) which is due for release in North America in February 2013 with distribution through eOne.