The Academy Hang is an overwhelming display, as we intended it to be. However, the display makes it easy to miss individual works. I would like to draw your attention to a favourite of mine, David Birkin’s diptych, taken from his series, Confessions. Their size does make them hard to miss, but the thought behind these photograph’s production might not be immediately obvious. Birkin’s sitters are asked to confess a secret they have never previously revealed. They are left alone in a room facing a camera. When they feel ready they open the shutter and when they are finished, they close it. Each exposure is determined by the length of time its subject chooses to speak - their secret revaled but only by the silence of photography.

TOM GRIFFITHS
Joint Head of Curation

Although each room reflects an individual theme, there are aspects of each which actively break up the unity between works. My favourite of these is Dia Al-Azzawi’s Book of Shame. It is one of the exhibition’s more modest and unassuming pieces but questions the benignity of the private collection and implies that modern museums are often built on the pillage of other civilizations. This object is especially potent because it speaks about the abject shame the artist feels towards his people having plundered their own country’s treasures during the war in Iraq. The irreversible traces of destruction which are so clearly stated here, grow even more intense when we consider that such pillage continues in the Middle Eastern warzone.

MATTHEW REEVES
Joint Head of Curation