Places of Pain (Recognising the pain of others)

Background The ‘literary’, ‘fictional’ and ‘artistic’ in anthropology has been celebrated by James Clifford, who wrote: ‘Literary processes—metaphor, figuration, narrative—affect the ways cultural phenomena are registered’. Drawing upon this idea, we have combined the documentary and fictional in a multimedia exhibition. Art and anthropology in this exhibition complement each other, creating a third space between the two disciplines and two realities; one is factual and the other exist as a feeling and memory (Schneider & Wright 2013). The factual is interwoven with symbols ‘hidden’ and ‘encrypted’ as metaphors and allegories (Sturken & Cartwright 2001, Mitchell 1994). The new visual reality becomes then universally readable, with its presence causing an even stronger and more conclusive effect than the reality itself (Freedberg 1986), with artwork becoming a museum-like artefact that serves the function of semi-historical reference. Contribution The exhibition discusses the role of the artistic, imaginative and creative in the documentary, ethnographic and scholarly-and vice versa-and how the fusion of the different disciplinary approaches can inform and enrich approaches to memory studies and dealing with the past. The authors consider how art exhibitions can be used both as a research approach and a collaborative research outcome. Significance The exhibition is a creative output of the ARC project on the memories of war, gender and displacement and was presented in a galleries, museums and community venues in Australia, Europe and the USA in 2017 and 2018. By mixing photographs, text, documents, graphics, sound and video in reconstructing the fragmented realities, the exhibition calls for the recognition of the resilience of ordinary people and the acknowledgment of ‘ordinariness’ and individuality of those who have posthumously been put into collective categories, mass graves and war statistics, or elevated to the abstract status of nation’s martyrs.