Commentary

Art after Auschwitz is barbaric: cultural ideology of silence through the politics of representation
Yvonne Kyriakides
ROYAL COLLEGE
OF

ART, LONDON

My recent thesis, which investigated competing discourses in the representation of genocide through post-Second World War art practice and theory, raises issues concerning the values of agency by focusing on the social and cultural promotion of forms of representation (Kyriakides, 2004). Implicit social controls, which govern the cultural representation of genocide, are apparently grounded in solid foundations of cultural theory and endorsed through philosophical discourse. This commentary focuses on one such foundation, the taboo, commonly referenced through media sources. T.W. Adornos phrase, To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric, has been frequently cited in post-Second World War culture in support of a prohibition against the representation of the Holocaust. This commentary contextualizes the phrase within the chronology of Adornos shifting position, and questions why the phrase commanded such widespread acceptance given that its social deployment is not only misrepresentative of the complexity of Adornos philosophical and cultural theory, but also neglects his subsequent retractions. This commentary proposes the emergence of an ideology of silence, which, far from reecting Adornos philosophical position, actually counterposes it. This commentary examines issues of agency through power locations, manifestations of image control and mystication. Issues raised concerning not only the cultural representation of genocide, warfare and occupation, but also agencies that inform their control, have timely implications for cultural and media disciplines in the volatile and combative atmosphere of our contemporary situation.

Prohibition and shifts

Perhaps one of the most highly referenced quotations of all art theory, To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric, was written in 1949 and published in 1951 (Adorno, 1983: 34).1 Very much in the vein of Platos famous banning of poets from the Republic (Plato, 1987), this is an essay in which Adorno a philosopher, a theorist addresses his peers, other philosophers, other theorists. However, the phrase, isolated as it is through a lack of analysis of the deeper (and more esoteric) Media, Culture & Society 2005 SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks and New Delhi), Vol. 27(3): 441450 [ISSN: 0163-4437 DOI: 10.1177/0163443705051995]

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issues with which Adorno engaged, assumed enormous relevance as a social stricture, a prohibition, a taboo. It is not unreasonable to suggest (given the incredible weight of Adornos material as well as the difculties with its translation) that, through the great simplication of material whose meaning diminishes exponentially with its reduction, that it is on the level of social approbation that the phrase derives its extraordinary potency. The phrase exists without a context, as a sensational summary, as a soundbite. This, Foucault described as a slide: the process whereby a fairly evolved philosophical discourse, rather than being relayed by additional work which perfects it, becomes a consumer item, a mere slogan. Little by little, from the book to the review, to the newspaper article . . . to television, we come to summarize a work in terms of slogans . . . it only took three weeks to convert my book on will to knowledge into the slogan sexuality has never been repressed. (Foucault, 1990: 445) Adornos prohibition of poetry after Auschwitz was received as silencing the arts. However, a slow change of view covering a 20-year time-span can be constructed, and is demonstrated here, again working through soundbites. In 1962, while still resisting genocide as cultural property, Adorno explored the need for suffering to nd its voice within art practice: I do not want to soften my statement that it is barbaric to continue to write poetry. . .. But . . . suffering . . . also demands a continued existence of the very art it forbids; hardly elsewhere does suffering still nd its own voice . . . The most signicant artists of the period have followed this course. (Adorno, 1992: 878)2 In 1966, Adorno claimed for the social scientist the ground he denied artists. Realizing a possibility of further genocides, and, with art shamed into mute oblivion, he claimed for educators the task of addressing Auschwitz as an urgent priority. Ironically, his frustration was also expressed with the taboo nature of the genocide: The premier demand upon all education is that Auschwitz not happen again. Its priority before any other requirement is such that I believe I need not and should not justify it. . . . Yet the fact that one is so barely conscious of this demand and the questions it raises shows that the monstrosity has not penetrated peoples minds deeply, itself a symptom of the continuing potential for its recurrence as far as peoples conscious and unconscious is concerned. Every debate about the ideals of education is trivial and inconsequential compared to this single ideal: never again Auschwitz. (Adorno, 1998: 191)3 It was in 1966 that Adorno suggested his prohibition may have been wrong, and that he also shared misgivings about the efcacy of silence as a response: There is no getting out of this. . . . Perennial suffering has as much right to expression as a tortured man has to scream; hence it may have been wrong to say that after Auschwitz you could no longer write poems. (Adorno, 1996: 3627)4 The following year, 1967, conrmed this reversal, and, while forbidding lighthearted art, Adorno allowed for possibilities to emerge through the use of new forms, by which humour was salvaged, such as in Beckett:

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The statement that it is not possible to write poetry after Auschwitz does not hold absolutely, but it is certain that after Auschwitz, because Auschwitz was possible and remains possible in the foreseeable future, lighthearted art is no longer conceivable. . . . Humor is salvaged in Becketts plays because they infect the spectator with laughter about the absurdity of laughter and laughter about despair . . . the third possibility, however, is cloaked in obscurity. (Adorno, 1992: 2513)5 This change of view is signicant. With the passage of time, the demand for numbed silence (as artistic response) had moved to a requirement for response, a response, however, which took a third way. Adorno theorized such a response through the analysis of formal characteristics which reected raher than mimicked political realities. This retraction was ignored, in favour of the promotion his earlier phrase. Contextualization through Adornos writings On numerous grounds, it is difcult to make the phrase, when detached from its context, hold up as representative of Adornos beliefs. For example, Adorno works through the premise that recognized that all culture, art and its critique, is barbaric, a premise that the critic must recognize his complicity and guilt in a barbaric culture. Adornos act is one of self-implication: both he and art are part of the barbarism (existing in a society that upholds the perpetration of genocide) he seeks to understand and overcome. The forbidding of art (as well as the act of criticism) may be seen as relating to the reective self-understanding of the theorist, a central gesture of critical theory (Bernstein, 1994). Adornos prohibition of poetry may be read through such a recognition. Also, Adornos writings reveal an intense mistrust of a soundbite culture, through which his phrase is repeatedly reproduced. There are, throughout Adornos works, mentions of his disapproval of reication, stereotyping and slogans, which he felt characterized his contemporary culture, as indicated by examples in the essays Cultural Criticism and Society (1949, in Adorno, 1983: 34), The Artist as Deputy (1953, in Adorno, 1991: 99) and Those Twenties (1962, in Adorno, 1998): Slogans make themselves suspect not just because they serve to degrade thoughts into mere counters; they are also the index of their untruth (Adorno, 1998: 41). Additionally, while the phrase suggests both taboo and silence as a response in the face of suffering, reections on both the necessity for the expression of suffering through art and also the necessity for art because of the existence of suffering, are in evidence throughout Adornos writings of the 1960s (e.g. Adorno, 1992: 7694, 1996: 1718, 2002: 63). While art and culture are both conictual and found wanting, and the prohibition of art after Auschwitz does not hold, Adornos assertions that art is a resistant force are frequent (Adorno, 1991: 39, 1992: 293). For example, Aesthetic Theory (1970/1997) provides an example of Adornos social purpose for art: The socially critical zones of artworks are those where it hurts, where in their expression, historically determined, the untruth of the social situation comes to light. It is actually this against which the rage in art reacts. (Adorno, 1997: 237) The early essay of 1945, All the Worlds not a Stage (in Adorno, 2002: 143) certainly indicates Adornos lack of condence in arts ability to address major catastrophic events. While he later reveals, in Commitment (1962) that both the

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didactic and the literal representation of historic events are false, art is not apolitical. This is not the time for political works of art; rather, politics have migrated into the autonomous work of art (Adorno, 1992: 934). This is not only an indication of Adornos shifting view on possible artistic forms, but also his vision of future genocides. To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric appears to posit the Holocaust as a dening moment, which is a notion of great social resonance, though philosophically problematic for some (Foucault, 1990: 356). The phrase was, however, resonant with public shock in response to documentary visual evidence in a century in which evidence was hidden under the guilt of the perpetrators and the trauma of the surviving witnesses. There are a number of indications that, following his retraction, Adorno was later concerned with more expanded global issues and that the retraction marked a move into a wide-reaching space of non-sectarianism and principles of no particular ethnic or religious identication. The year of his retraction 1966 produced not only Education after Auschwitz (in Adorno, 1998), which expresses his urgency about developing education programmes to protect against what he sees as the continuing potential for the recurrence of genocide, but also Negative Dialectics in which are indicated global concerns, such as injustices in Asia and Africa (Adorno, 1996: 285). An Open Letter to Rolf Hochhuth (1967, in Adorno, 1992) engages also with the catastrophic bombing of Hiroshima, while Marginilia to Theory and Praxis (unpublished, in Adorno, 1998), refers not only to Auschwitz but also Hiroshima, Vietnam and the self-protective practice of looking on. In his nal work he states that the real barbarism of antiquity was the fact of the exclusion of the slavery, genocide and contempt for human life from its artistic visual representation (1997: 161). Fearful imaginations As Judith Herman has observed (1994), successful trauma recovery may move from a period of introversion to an attitude in which social awareness and connection increases, to participation in a social campaigns. Adorno moved from advocating silence, to interest in educational campaigns and an increased awareness of the probability of future genocides and a more inclusive worldview. Similarly, Bruno Bettelheim moved through this shifting terrain. His 1947 essay, German Concentration Camps, expressed a lack of concern about repetition of genocide in the future; The Ignored Lesson of Ann Frank (1960), introduced a new-found critique (with its impotent benet of hindsight) of the practice of silence and denial and it subsequent self-destructive results; Surviving (1976), introduced an expanded political perspective; The Holocaust One Generation Later (1977)6 struck out not only at a failure of responsibility among global powers but also the potential for repetition, stating: I have often felt . . . that only withdrawal into silence will do. I think Theodor Adorno felt this way when he wrote that there can be no poetry after Auschwitz. But if we remain silent, then we perform exactly as the Nazis wanted: behave as if it never did happen. If we remain silent, we permit those who have falsied what happened to present the world with a fallacious understanding of one of the most tragic chapters of recent history. Thus thoughtful men are closed off from valid insights into what attitudes we must develop to prevent it all from ever happening again. (Bettelheim, 1979: 97) The issue of the social promotion of Adornos phrase of prohibition right through to the end of the 20th century coexisted with the invisibility of both his key retraction of 1966 and also his complex analysis of the potential of new art forms.

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In the mid-1960s, at the time when societys numbed silence as a response to the Holocaust appeared to be thawing, Adorno offered society a retraction of his prohibition in favour of an articulation which encompassed, rst, a greater condence in the new art forms that were emerging in the works of Beckett and Schoenberg (including art as social critique), second, a recontextualization of the Holocaust within global histories and, third, the promotion of educational systems to defeat the practice of genocide. In this, Adornos later position is qualied but closer to the earlier position of Hannah Arendt, whose reading from the outset directly engaged with political concerns. In 1948, Arendt argued that focusing on the realities, rather than fear, produced greater political insight and potential for resistance. She stated the necessity of breaking the taboo on genocide. Drawing a distinction between, on the one hand, eye-witness reports and recollections, and, on the other hand, those aroused by fearful imagination, she concluded that it was through the latter that an understanding of the genocide perpetrated in the concentration camps might be conveyed, seeking not to effect a personality change but rather to arouse politically: . . . dwelling on horrors would seem to be indispensable for the understanding of totalitarianism. But recollection can no more do this than the uncommunicative eyewitness report. . . . Only the fearful imagination of those who have been aroused by such reports but have not actually been smitten in their own esh, of those who are consequently free from the bestial, desperate terror which, when confronted by real, present horror, inexorably paralyzes everything that is not mere reaction, can afford to keep thinking about horrors. Such thoughts are useful only for the perception of political contexts and the mobilization of political passions. (Arendt, 1986: 441) Arendts appeal, in contradiction to Adornos early prohibition, was to those with fearful imaginations (a category that might encompass artists) and those personally distanced from the effects of the horror. Ideology of silence Prohibition persisted within a cultural location of an ideology of silence, as theorized, for example, by Susan Sontag. Her essay in The Aesthetics of Silence written in 1967 (in Sontag, 1994), the year of Adornos retraction, may be read as a faint echo of Adornos analysis of silence as the asymptote to which Becketts Endgame (1970) tends.7 However, Sontag theorized the notion that the condition of silence was one in which the modern artist was to be found, and, in a simplication in relation to Adornos theorization, her ideas resonate more with the mythology of taboo than the analysis of formal possibilities for art found in the writings of Adorno of the 1960s. Sontag identied art as one of the most active metaphors for the spiritual project in the modern era. In the post-psychological conception of consciousness she identied a new mythology that had attached itself to art. within the activity of art many paradoxes involved in attaining an absolute state of being described by the great religious mystics . . . a theology of Gods absence . . . a craving for the cloud of unknowing beyond knowledge and the silence beyond speech (Sontag, 1994: 35). She wrote, on the role of the artist: he [sic] is more satised by being silent than nding a voice in art. . . . Silence is the artists ultimate other-worldly gesture: by silence, he frees himself from servile bondage to the world (Sontag, 1994: 6); and: . . . to be a victim of the craving for silence is to be, in still a further sense, superior to everyone else. . . . [he rarely] becomes literally silent. More

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typically, he continues speaking, but in a manner that his audience cant hear. Most valuable art in our time has been experienced by audiences as a move into silence (or unintelligibility or invisibility or inaudibility). (Sontag, 1994: 7) In her essay Platos Cave (Sontag, 1978) rst published in 1973, Sontag positioned herself against the representation of genocidal horror through photography, arguing, however, for the possible exception of photographs of the Nazi camp horrors which have gained the status of ethical reference points (Sontag, 1978: 21). She posited the idea that conscience and compassion could be corrupted by photographs, and also that such images could anesthetize. She argued that concerned photography had done at least as much to deaden conscience as to arouse it, and that the ethical content of photographs is fragile (Sontag, 1978: 201). These were inuential views through which the suspicion of representation was endorsed (mirroring Judaic norms of iconoclasm) and, to some extent, were recanted in her more recent work, Regarding the Pain of Others (2003: 94). This change of view and retraction, however took place in a much later chronological timescale. Power relations and silence The 1940s Allied liberation footage of concentration camps shocked the world. There had been little analysis of genocide; the term itself was only coined in 1944. The photographic and lmic documentation opened the way into a secret and atrocious space. This seeing into the guarded space of the perpetrators was theorized by Susan Sontag, inuentially though perhaps misguidedly, as a moral act of corruption (Sontag, 1978). The notion that the shift from representation to repression of representation operates within a power relation is perhaps more convincing, and certainly less repressive. Discipline and Punish (1991), Foucaults commentary on the development of juridical practices, rst published in 1975, is of relevance in that his analysis of the visibilities and invisibilities of punishment views the representation of punishment as a complex social function operating in a eld of power. His early examples, rst, the shocking and lengthy public torture of Damiens the regicide, in 1757, and, second, Leon Fauchers dispassionate rules for the house of young prisoners in Paris 80 years later, mark a span of time during which a radical shift in penal style had taken place, as public spectacle was replaced by a closed regime centred on a timetable. While the disappearance of torture as a public spectacle was, he felt, essentially assumed to be one of a process of humanization, in fact a signicant recodication (of law, justice, humanity) had in reality taken place. His subsequent analysis raises questions concerning the implications of a system which shifts from blatant and gross depiction to its converse erasure, a system of hidden and covert happenings materialized, in the public conscience, by trace, by absence. Both the presentation of a lengthy and gruesome torture (punishment), and also the presentation of convicts as spectacles for public consumption, were common practice in European cities until new theories of law and crime introduced a new era of penal justice, arising between 1769 and 1810 (Foucault, 1991: 7). An issue that Foucault identied as of material importance was a certain blurring of sympathies, whereby the violence of the punishment created confusions, to make the executioner resemble a criminal, judges murderers, to reverse the roles at the last moment, to make the tortured criminal an object of pity or admiration (1991: 9). One result of the invisibility of justice, of the removal of the body as target for penal repression, was the fact that justice no longer took public responsibility for

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the violence of its practice. The punishment of the body behind the closed doors of the prison relieved the juridical system of the public exposure of shame brought upon those who inicted punishment. The shift was from the iniction of pain upon a body to a system in which the body was subjected to constraints, privations and prohibitions. And, where capital punishment was practised, it happened in a space from which the public were excluded. During the last days of public capital punishment, the condemned man was covered from sight, draped in a large white shroud, his face covered with black crepe (Foucault, 1991: 14). The introduction of the negative the trace, the shadow by analogy, is perhaps not simply a reference to the literal void created by the massive erasures during the execution of genocide, but is perhaps also the effect of the way in which the positive representation, sight, viewing is itself vested with power relations. Representation is involved in a political eld, it emits signs, it needs to be censored. But the trace, the shadow, the negative, is the effect and instrument of a political anatomy (Foucault, 1991: 30). The trace is the prison of the presence. Through this reading, the development of social practice through an inventory of traces and negatives would form part of a positive identity. In current Western practice, capital punishment is hidden, and forbidden as spectacle. Punishment, which no longer addresses itself to the body, is replaced, Foucault asserts, by a deeper, more pervasive address, to the heart, the thoughts, the will, the inclinations, indeed the soul. Foucault says: It was an important moment. The old partners of the spectacle of punishment, the body and the blood, gave way. A new character came on the scene, masked. It was the end of a certain kind of tragedy; comedy began, with shadow play, faceless voices, impalpable entities. The apparatus of punitive justice must now bite into this bodiless reality. (Foucault, 1991: 1617) Terry Eagleton (1988) has proposed that the collective identity of an oppressed group is constituted by the shared fact of their oppression. Such collective identity is importantly negative, and bound, over a period of time, to generate a positive particular culture, without which political emancipation is impossible, but this is never an unambiguous gain, and is, to some extent, collusive with its antagonists. However, the operation of controls to restrict and inhibit the practice of representation (like its opposite, propaganda) also bears a use value in the servicing of hegemonic agendas. Image control and mystication Peter Novicks The Holocaust and Collective Memory, rst published in 1999 and written in the wake of the Rwandan genocide in 1994, is independent in its analysis of Holocaust memory. Novick describes what he sees as the representation of the Holocaust. He states that the Holocaust was in some undened way, sacred, and mandated some sort of special rules for its representation . . . a proposition to which a great many people at least paid lip service (Novick, 2001: 212). He does not address how or why such special rules, if indeed there are any, might have emerged. But, unlike dominant forms of Holocaust discussion whose discourses relate rst to historicity (the use of witness testimony, and documentary lm and photography, and erasure) and, second, to memory (through the living conscious, the collective conscious, personal testimony, with a frequent citing of Freudian readings), Novicks reading is through agency (in particular of use value for Jewish identity), which he traces through both the suppression of Holocaust memory in the two decades following the war, and what he regards as the foregrounding of

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Holocaust victimhood in the period of the 1980s and 1990s. In his view, a competition for primacy ensued, taking many forms, among which the most pervasive was an angry insistence on the uniqueness of the Holocaust. George Steiner accepts, with qualication, as respectable, Gitta Serenys thesis (Sereny, 2000), which rejects the uniqueness of the Holocaust in placing what Steiner calls the Auschwitz phenomenon within a context of 20th-century totalitarian massacres. However, Steiner explains his ambivalence: I cannot come to any clear view of this desperate situation. There are moments when the Nazi attempt to exterminate all Jews because they existed . . . seems to me unlike any other act of crazed savagery. At other moments, I am not certain as to the difference with, say, the massacre of the natives in the Belgian Congo (10 million) or that of Armenians or of Kulaks. (Steiner, 2000) While a complexity of factors are involved, approached solely through power relations, the discourse that insists on unrepresentability (emanating from Adornos prohibition) takes on quite different meanings. These meanings rest on issues primarily realized through claims of agency, such as, through Novick, the reication of victimhood, and hence a requirement for special rules. Novick argues that the claim for the uniqueness of a particular historical event is an intellectual sleight of hand, and that resemblances and differences are proper points of discussion. He states: The assertion that the Holocaust is unique like the claim that it is singularly incomprehensible or unrepresentable is in practice, deeply offensive. What else can all of this possibly mean except your catastrophe, unlike ours, is ordinary; unlike ours is comprehensible; unlike ours is representable. (Novick, 2001: 9) Following the innovatory stance of Lanzmanns Shoah, the reication of silence through mandatory sacred rules, was, if true, a real step backwards, away from the theoretical ground covered by genocide theorists attempting to foreground genocide as an international crime. According to Novicks analysis, of course, survivor art would necessarily be marginalized by competing claims based on agency from hegemonic agendas. Survivor art, with its potential for producing a frame of reference for genocide, has certainly received relatively little attention. Further thoughts The social adoption of his soundbite as a slogan in support of any particular cause is something to which Adorno would have been unlikely to subscribe, given his afrmative sense of possibilities through which new art forms address the subject of genocide, as indicated in his later works; his recontextualization of genocide within global histories of bombing, gratuitous warfare, and global inequalities; as well as his urgent review of educational measures through which the practice of genocide may be defeated. The social reication of ideologies supportive of the mystication of genocide are in direct conict with, and hinder the uptake of, the analytical work produced by genocide theorists and conict resolution theorists. While ethical considerations are emphasized in upholding specic particularized agendas, it would appear that cultural independence from the support of hegemonic agenda is a primary ethical requirement given times when hegemonic support is in favour of the practice of genocide in its various forms.

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Current political agendas are mapped through an abundance of negative imagery prevalent in notions of invisibility, for example, hidden enemies, uncounted civilian deaths, censored returning cofns and hidden weapons of mass destruction, which raise timely questions relating to the politics of representation. Such questions can be investigated through a number of channels: for example, the appropriate location and interrogation of philosophical and cultural sources drawn upon through common social and media usage; the addressing of mystication and ideologies of invisibilities as potential sources of manipulation equal to those of more obvious positive forms such as propaganda; consideration of power relations of imagery, namely the politicization of, not only representation, but also its negative condition; attention to image-control associated with agenda-setting and dogmas seeking phoney validation through soundbite philosophy. How else can we attempt to make our shared world a safer place?

Notes
1. The original German source was Kulturkritik und Gesellschaft, written in 1949, published in Soziologische Forschung in untere Zeit (Cultural Criticism and Society, in Adorno, 1963/1983). 2. The original German source was a broadcast on Radio Bremen on 28 March 1962, Engagement oder Kunstlerische Autonomie, published in Die Neue Rundschau 73 (1962) (Commitment, in Adorno, 1992, rst published 1965). 3. The original German source was a radio broadcast on the radio station Hessischen Rundfunk, 18 April 1966 (Adorno, 1969). 4. Original German source was Negativ Dialektik (Negative Dialectics) (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkampf, 1966). 5. The original German source Ist die Kunst heiter? (Is Art Light-hearted?, Suddeutsche Zeitung 15/16 July 1967 (Adorno, 1992, rst published 1974). 6. All these essays are collected in Bettelheim (1979). 7. Parts of Adornos Trying to Understand Endgame (originally Versuch, das Endspiel zu verstehen) were read at the seventh Suhrkamp Verlag evening (27 February 1961); the essay is published in Adorno (1992).

References
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Adorno, T.W. (1997) Aesthetic Theory. London: Athlone Press. (First published 1970.) Adorno, T.W. (1998) Critical Models, Interventions and Catchwords. New York: Columbia University Press. Adorno, T. (2002) Minima Moralia: Reections on a Damaged Life. London: Verso. Arendt, H. (1986) The Origins of Totalitarianism. London: Andre Deutsch. Beckett, S. (1970) Endgame. London: Faber and Faber. Bernstein, J.M. (ed.) (1994) The Frankfurt School: Critical Assessments. London: Routledge. Bettelheim, B. (1979) Surviving and Other Essays. London: Thames and Hudson. Eagleton, T. (1988) Nationalism, Colonialism and Literature: Irony and Commitment. Derry: Field Day Theatre. Foucault, M. (1990) Politics, Philosophy, Culture: Interviews and Other Writings, 19771984, edited by L.D. Kritzman. London: Routledge. Foucault, M. (1991) Discipline and Punish. London: Penguin. Herman, J. (1994) Trauma and Recovery, from Domestic Abuse to Political Terror. London: Pandora. Kyriakides, Y.I.M (2004) Genocide and Culture: Competing Discourses in PostWorld War II Art Practice and Theory. MPhil thesis, Royal College of Art, London. Plato (1987) The Republic. London: Penguin. Novick, P. (2001) The Holocaust and Collective Memory. London: Bloomsbury. Sereny, G. (2000) The German Trauma: Experiences and Reections, 19382000. London: Allen Lane. Sontag, S. (1978) On Photography. London: Allen Lane. Sontag, S. (1994) Styles of Radical Will. London: Vintage. Sontag, S. (2003) Regarding the Pain of Others. London: Hamish Hamilton. Steiner, G. (2000) Down among the Dead, The Observer 17 September.

Yvonne Kyriakides is an artist and writer. She recently completed an MPhil at the Royal College of Art. She was awarded the Saatchi and Saatchi Prize for painting and has exhibited in the UK (including the Institute of Contemporary Arts, the Whitechapel Gallery, the Royal Academy of Arts) and internationally. Her works appears in numerous collections including St Annes College, Oxford University and Peterborough Museum. Kyriakides has taught as visiting tutor at South Bank University and the Royal College of Art. Her book, My Czech Grandmother: A Story was published in 2005 by Image Word, London, in collaboration with EMH Arts. Her research interests include culture and genocide. Address: P.O. Box 52427, London NW3 1XW, UK. [email: y.kyriakides @blueyonder.co.uk]