[ecrea] Conference "Picturing the Family: Media, Narrative, Memory"

Picturing the Family: Media, Narrative, Memory

Conference organisers: Dr Silke Arnold-de Simine, Dr Nathalie Wourm, Dr 
Joanne Leal in conjunction with BRAKC  (Birkbeck Research in Aesthetics 
of Kinship and Community). Conference
10th & 11th  July  2014 - Room 414  Birkbeck Main Building, Malet St, 
London, WC1E 7HX



Conference programme
This conference will set out to explore how concepts of family have been 
acted out, reinvented, or deconstructed, through various media including 
the visual arts, literature, and museum exhibitions, across the 
centuries. The family picture will be considered both in its figurative 
and artefactual forms. We will look at the significance of the family 
picture in literary works or films (e.g. W.G. Sebald, Georges Perec’s W, 
or the Memory of Childhood, or Pedro Almodovar’s All About my Mother), 
and we will consider alternative concepts of family and kinship as 
pictured in paintings, photographs, graphic novels, and other visual 
media. We are interested in media transfers, the question of what 
happens to family pictures when they are included in literary or visual 
narratives whether these are autobiographical or fictional. We aim to 
explore how different media reproduce or replace the family picture, or 
evoke it once it becomes lost (e.g. through ekphrasis). We are also 
interested in the types of narratives that are created in museums, 
social media and family albums, through displays of family pictures and 
portraits.

Key questions to be examined will include: what are the changing 
conventions of the family picture and how do they reflect the changing 
conceptions of the institution of the family? Who is the addressee of 
the family portrait? How do family narratives and family pictures inform 
each other? What is the role of family pictures in individual and 
cultural memory? Is the family a privileged site of memorial 
transmission (Aleida Assmann, Marianne Hirsch)? Has it become the 
central trope through which national history is framed? What role do 
family pictures play within other cultural forms, e.g. in literature or 
film? Can other cultural forms offer alternatives to the kinds of family 
portrait we associate with photography?

Keynote speakers are: Professor Martha Langford (Concordia University, 
Montreal), Professor Annette Kuhn (Queen Mary University, London) and 
Professor Daniela Berghahn (Royal Holloway, London).



Registration & Payment:

Birkbeck staff and Birkbeck students   £15
Standard:  £30 &  £15 (non Birkbeck students)


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