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Day for Night: Landscapes of Walter Benjamin

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Venue: Birkbeck 43 Gordon Square

No booking required

Day for Night is a multimedia exhibition inspired by the landscapes inhabited in the life and thought of Frankfurt School intellectual Walter Benjamin. Text, photography and film takes the viewer on a journey from the place of Benjamin’s birth in Berlin to Capri and Naples, where he spent formative episodes of his life. The exhibition ends in Cataluñya, northern Spain, where Benjamin died while fleeing the Nazis in 1940. It documents the lasting legacy of Benjamin’s work nearly 80 years after his death.

Benjamin wrote several of his most famous works while in exile from Germany, and ended his life stateless, after being stripped of his German citizenship by the Nazi regime in 1939. In the current political landscape of Europe, issues of citizenship, rights and migration have acquired renewed urgency. Day for Night documents the predicament of a group of economic migrants in the border zone of northern Spain, and reunites Benjamin's texts, in fragmentary form, with members of the public in Berlin, London, Talinn, Estonia, and Cataluñya.

The exhibition takes its title from an effect in filmmaking in which night-time scenes are deliberately shot in the day then underexposed. This reversal allows the viewer to consider a basic principle of photography: how light and dark are mutually constituted. Through image and film the exhibition explores the interstitial zones of our lives, caught between exposure and refuge, and provokes a timely and urgent meditation on the enduring relationship between place, literature and rights.

The exhibition is a collaboration by fine art photographer Diego Ferrari, Kingston University, and Jean McNeil, Reader in Creative Writing, University of East Anglia.

20th September 2018- 6-8pm Exhibition launch and private view. Book your tickets here. All Welcome!

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