Background

The Norfolk Contemporary Art Society (NCAS), in partnership with The Forum in Norwich and Norwich University College of the Arts will stage a major city-centre photography exhibition, Photo-ID: Photographers and Scientists explore Identity, in August 2009, which will combine with a scientific context to address issues of how we construct personal and social identity, the ways in which our exploding information about the human genome does, or does not, impact on that, and the societal and ethical issues that emerge. The timing of this exhibition, which will be freely open to the general public, is designed to maximise synergy and interaction with two other major Norwich events that are taking place at that time. The first Director of the John Innes Centre, William Bateson, first coined the word ‘genetics’, and the John Innes Centre will be celebrating its 100th anniversary with an International Conference, Genetics: one hundred years on, in partnership with the Genetics Society (founded by William Bateson, www.genetics.org.uk/home) and covering issues relating to the post-human-genome era.

Also in August 2009, following on from the very successful CAN07 event (www.contemporaryartnorwich.co.uk), Norwich will be staging its next Biennial international visual arts festival, Contemporary Art Norwich ‘09 (CAN09), of which our exhibition would be an integral part. Contemporary Art Norwich is a biennial celebration of international contemporary visual art in venues and city centre sites across Norwich supported by a year round programme of exhibitions, commissions, artist support initiatives and education and audience development activity.

Two recent quotations:

“..references to genes and genomes are counterproductive in legal and political understandings of what it is to be human and a unique individual” Christine Hauskeller, 2004

“We lack a technologically informed, socially aware vision for national identity management, and we need to construct one” David Birch, 2007

The Objectives

1. To use the Photo-ID exhibition and related events to engage a broader public interest in how we construct identity, at both the social and personal level. By presenting both imaginative/visual (photographic) and biomedical approaches to identity, to encourage reflection about who we are, who others think we are, where we think we are and where we think we have come from.
2. To enable and excite a group of ten early-career photographers, with some prior briefings on the issues, to let their imaginations visually explore what identity might mean today to a variety of subjects and in a variety of places, and to present their results in an arresting context.
3. To present, explore and raise awareness of the social and ethical issues raised by recent research on the human genome and on genome-wide variation. To examine the contribution of the human genome to gender, ethnicity, surname, personality, disease and other components of identity. To challenge preconceptions of what race means at a genetic level and to present political and societal issues surrounding DNA databases, ID, DNA ancestry tests and biometric data and the role of the state, all in an accessible manner.