ARCHIVAL PHOTOGRAPHY OF EAST AND SOUTH EAST ASIA COMMUNITIES IN LIVERPOOL AS MODEL AND SOURCE

ARCHIVAL PHOTOGRAPHY OF EAST AND SOUTH EAST ASIA COMMUNITIES IN LIVERPOOL AS MODEL AND SOURCE

Talk by Emily Beswick

Q&A session moderated by Clare Chun-yu Liu

This Open Session centres on Emily Beswick’s research in which she engages with family photograph archives of East and Southeast Asian communities in Liverpool, UK, to reveal submerged narratives and memories. This talk explores visual archives of diasporic individuals and communities as a model and source for hybrid diasporic identities, diasporic feelings and diasporic practices of photography. A PhD researcher at the University of Liverpool and Tate Liverpool, Emily Beswick will discuss her method of participatory workshops, where participants use creative methods – including mapping, tracing and weaving – to materialise new interpretations of photographs from newspaper, documentary and family photograph archives.

Intrinsic to Emily’s research is the concept of ‘diasporic vision,’ drawing on Grace Cho (2008), Donna Haraway (1988), and Stuart Hall (1990). ‘Diasporic vision’ is a methodology of situated, embodied, affective and sensory engagements with photographs by diasporic individuals and communities. Her research asks the important questions: What photographic archives of the Chinese diaspora exist outside of the institutional collections? Do family photographs resist or challenge the dominant visual narratives of the diasporic Chinese community in Liverpool? If so, how far? What modes of situated diasporic vision can be used to read these photographs? These urgent enquiries are raised against the British cultural and political landscape, in which immigrant communities have historically had a lack of visibility and voice in the public discourse.

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Emily Beswick’s doctoral research investigates forms of looking and engagement with photographs of the Chinese community in Liverpool, through newspaper, documentary and family photograph archives, and using autobiographical, creative and participatory approaches.) In the summer of 2023, she facilitated the ‘Traces of Memory’ project, a series of collaborative and creative workshops with individuals from Liverpool’s East and South East Asian communities. Starting with the question ‘what stories do you family photographs tell?’, we explored the differences between family archives and institutional archives, the movements of family photographs, their collective and emotional histories, and practices of care. This culminated in a short exhibition at Tate Liverpool.

Clare Chun-yu Liu is a Taiwanese artist filmmaker and researcher. Clare is Postdoctoral Researcher at Brno University of Technology in Czech Republic and Research Fellow at Staatliche Museen zu Berlin in Germany. She has presented her research at Oxford University, Central Saint Martins and University College London, as well as her films at the ICA London, EXiS, Image Forum Festival and Kasseler Dokfest. Her article on the Brighton Pavilion has been published by the British Art Network.