Exhibitions Programme 2025-26

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.

Event

18 September 6.30 - 8pm
Book tickets

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. 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.