Berni Gallery exhibition and festival launch
Human Rights Festival exhibition
Monday 15 June to Saturday 27 June
Exhibition preview: Monday 15 June 5.30pm to 7pm
Free admission

The exhibition will consist of pictures from the Battlespace project
and from Richard Wainwright’s recent assignment in Mongolia.

"Battlespace"

Battlespace presents an unsanitised view of the continuing conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan to a public that has been shielded from disturbing or nuanced images of war. Battlespace questions the perceptions, agendas, and narratives of the military and the media and attempts to offer an unfiltered account from a group of photographers who saw it firsthand.

www.battlespaceonline.org
(Multimedia courtesy of daylightmagazine.org)

Mongolia images: Surviving the winter by Richard Wainwright
Under the streets of Ulaan Baatar, the coldest capital city in the world, many children struggle to survive the bitter winter. Munkhbat & Altangeret are both 15 and have lived in a manhole together for over 3 years. A tough, lonely existence, violence from drunken adults and other street children is ever present and their daily preoccupations are food and warmth. Forced into this situation by divorced and deceased parents, they still hope and strive for a better future.

www.richwainwright.com

Battlespace Photojournalism Talk
Photojournalists Teru Kuwayama and Balazs Gardi
Monday 15th June
Illustrated Talk: 7.30pm
£6.00

An evening of illustrated talks by some of the best photojournalists working today. A unique opportunity to understand the difficulties of reporting the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and many other humanitarian issues around the world. Guaranteed to be an insightful evening.

Teru Kuwayama: Since the 2002, photographer Teru Kuwayama has made more than 15 trips to Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Kashmir. He has traveled both independently, and as an embedded reporter with military forces. He is the primary architect of the Battlespace project.

http://www.terukuwayama.com

Balazs Gardi: Balazs is a Hungarian freelance photographer, and member of the prestigious VII Network photo agency, who focuses on documenting the everyday life of marginalized communities facing humanitarian crises. His current long-term project aims to capture how geopolitical conflicts shape the future of people worldwide.

http://www.balazsgardi.com

Against the Grain: An Artist’s Survival Guide to Peru
Tuesday 16th June
Film: 7.30pm

USA 2008
65 mins
Director: Ann Kaneko
£6.00

Speaker: Ann Kaneko, director

Against the Grain chronicles the passion and commitment of pioneering artists who have resisted censorship to tell the violent and explosive history of Peru. The four-featured artists struggle to express themselves under a repressive political regime.
Their stirring artwork documents years of terrorism, corruption and the hard-line government of ex-president Alberto Fujimori. By recounting Peru's past, they contribute to a larger collective memory of Latin America and connect the experiences of this country to our own.
The film jumps to the present as artists face continuing uncertainties under their newly elected leader, Alan Garcia, a former president, who governed Peru during some of its darkest years, both economically and politically.

www.annkaneko.com/againstthegrain

Taxi To The Dark Side
Thursday 18 June
Film: 7.30pm

USA 2007
106 mins (1 hour 49 mins)
Director: Alex Gibney
£6.00

Speakers: Moazzam Begg (British former Guantanamo Bay prisoner) & Ahmed Ghappour, Staff Attorney from Reprieve, who is featured in Taxi To The Dark Side.

Awarded Best Documentary Feature at the 2008 Oscars, Taxi To The Dark Side is a gripping investigation into the shocking mistreatment of United States’ prisoners of war held in Afghanistan, Iraq and Guantanamo Bay. It is directed by acclaimed documentary filmmaker Alex Gibney.
 
This disturbing and often brutal film is the most incisive examination to date of the Bush administration’s willingness to undermine human rights in its prosecution of the ‘war on terror’. By probing the torture and death of an innocent taxi driver in 2002 at the Bagram Air Force Base in Afghanistan, the film exposes a policy of detention and interrogation that condones torture and grants immunity to government officials for crimes against humanity.

www.taxitothedarkside.co.uk

Cruel and Unusual
Satirical stand up comedy by Keith Farnan
Friday 19th June
Comedy: 7.30pm
70 mins
£12.00

Cruel and Unusual is Keith Farnan's first full-length solo stand-up show since he stopped working as a solicitor.
Although the death penalty is not often noted as a topic of comedy, Keith's experiences as an intern with a public defender in Georgia, and with the Innocence Project in New York, allow him to take a comic swipe at the lunacy of capital punishment.

Cruel and Unusual is a comedy show about Keith’s journey from Law School in Ireland to the Innocence Project in New York City, his meeting with Sister Helen Prejean of Dead Man Walking fame, to a public defender’s office in Georgia, where he figures out that the Irish might just be the only people who can tell America to stop the madness.

www.myspace.com/irishcomedian