The End of Art is Peace

Location

Solomon Hall

Free

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

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

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.”

For more information go to www.sandiego.edu/cctc/events/steafan_hanvey.php.