International Conference: The Representation of Pain (22-24 April 2005)
UCC's History of Art hosted an international three-day conference on pain on 22-24 April 2005.
The conference aimed to provide a theoretical and scholarly context for the representation of pain in general, in photography and in other media. Pain as such—construed as the viewer’s discomfort or the representation of another’s pain—is a principal but muted theme in much of visual art. Beginning with photography and film the representation of pain became more explicit, and in the last hundred years images of pain have played important roles in journalism and politics.
The conference also addressed the historically specific practice of the form of torture and execution known as lingchi, ‘death of a thousand cuts’. Photographs of this practice were made famous by Georges Bataille in Tears of Eros. Since then they have become a common currency in the art world, but they have not yet received the scholarly attention even among scholars of surrealism.
The conference will be published as Representations of Pain.
