Ecologies of Violence: A Conversation
When:
—
Venue:
Birkbeck 43 Gordon Square
Peltz Gallery warmly invites you to an in-conversation event and private view of the Ecologies of Violence exhibition, as part of Art History Festival 2025: Art & Nature. This exhibition of moving image works explores geographically and ecologically devastated areas deemed too hazardous for human habitation. The curator, archaeologist Esther Breithoff, will be joined by art and design historian Charlotte Ashby to discuss practice-led research, art history at Birkbeck and the research project leading to the exhibition.
Dr Esther Breithoff is Senior Lecturer in Contemporary Archaeology and Heritage at Birkbeck, University of London. She joined Birkbeck in 2019 after holding postdoctoral positions at UiT The Arctic University of Norway and the UCL Institute of Archaeology. Her research spans the fields of Contemporary Archaeology and Critical Heritage Studies and has ranged across a number of different topics—including war, natural and cultural heritage, nuclear and petroleum industries, dictatorships and biobanking—but traces a common set of interests in the relationships between conflicts, resources, recycling and rights across more-than-human worlds in the Anthropocene.
Dr Charlotte Ashby is Programme Director, Art History Certificate Programmes; School of Historical Studies at Birkbeck, University of London. Her research focuses on issues of nationalism, international exchange and modern identities in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Her work ranges over art, architecture and design and her areas of interest cover art journals, new art and changing cultures of display around 1900.
This event is part of Art History Festival 2025 organised by the Association for Art History.
Exhibition information:
ECOLOGIES OF VIOLENCE
3 October – 5 December, weekdays 10am - 8pm
Opening reception: 2 October, 6 - 8pm
Across diverse landscapes, conflict-ridden regions often become ‘exclusion’ or ‘red zones’: geographically and ecologically devastated areas deemed too hazardous for human habitation. More than a century after the First World War, parts of Vimy Ridge on the old Western Front in France remain off limits to the public due to buried explosives, collapsing tunnels, and toxic residues. This now forested exclusion zone is a landscape shaped by human and more-than-human ecologies of violence. This exhibition features Zone Rouge / Red Zone: Back Forest Reflections, a film-poem using infrared footage, reflective surfaces, and ambient sound to evoke the layered histories of destruction and renewal. Together with 3D scans of the forest, Ecologies of Violence offers a glimpse into an otherwise inaccessible heritage site where nature and conflict are deeply entangled.
This project presents research carried out as part of the UKRI FLF ‘Ecologies of Violence: Heritage and Conflict in More-Than-Human Worlds’, led by Dr Esther Breithoff and supported by Dr Matthew Leonard.
Contact name: Peltz Gallery
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