Pet Shop Boys, Emotional risk taking in the arts, The Eye As Witness
Stig talks to the Pet Shop Boys about their new studio album Hotspot and in our continuing series on risk in the arts discusses emotional risk with Louise Allen and Ahir Shah.
The Pet Shop Boys talk about their highly anticipated new studio album Hotspot, which is released today. Hotspot is the duo’s final release with producer Stuart Price who ushered in a period of ‘electronic purism’ in their work. Recorded using a large amount of analogue equipment, Hotspot is a departure from the Pet Shop Boy’s recent hyper dance pop sound.
Front Row's series examining risk in the arts focuses today on emotional risk. What is it like for writers and performers to explore their own personal backgrounds and issues and then to go public with their revelations and confessions, and how much has that changed in recent years? Louise Allen addresses the challenge of putting her experiences of an abusive childhood in foster care onto the page in her memoir Thrown Away Child, and stand-up Ahir Shah discusses drawing on his own personal mental health issues in his stage act.
Next Monday is International Holocaust Remembrance Day, and the 75th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp. We are all familiar with images of victims of the Holocaust. Most of these, though, were actually taken by the Nazis for propaganda purposes and to create a historical record. The Eye as Witness , a new touring exhibition organised by The National Holocaust Centre and Museum, challenges these views. Professor Maiken Umbach explains how, using virtual reality technology, viewers can enter into a photograph to experience how it was framed and, crucially, what is not shown, including the photographer taking the picture. The exhibition focuses, too, on photographs taken, at enormous risk, by the inmates of the ghettoes and camps. Some of these images were buried and retrieved once the war was over. They reveal, amidst degradation and evil, a zest for life, humanity and love.
Presenter: Stig Abell
Producer: Hilary Dunn
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What are the emotional risks of using your life in your art?
Duration: 09:52
Pet Shop Boys
Hotspot, thenew album is out now.
Images:
Main image above: The Pet Shop Boys
Image to the left: the Pet Shop Boys -Â Neil Tennant (Left) and Chris Lowe (Right) with Stig Abell (Centre)
Emotional risk taking in the arts
Front Row's Risk season continues with and .
Join the audience in the ±«Óãtv Radio Theatre on 05 February 2020 for the unveiling of Front Row's Risk List - our top ten riskiest artworks in the last 20 years - live on air. Book your free tickets from ±«Óãtv Shows and Tours.
Image: Louise Allen with her painting Birth Mother in Ocelot
Image credit: Lloyd Allen
Hear how Louise Allen found solace in art and literature - which provided a lifeline and an escape from the pain and deprivation that was being inflicted on her from a very early age - in Front Row's programme about art in response to truama.
Ahir Sha's live comedy tour runs from 14 February 2020 in Southend, and then visits Colchester, Leicester, Poole, Reading, Aldershot, Leicester, Luton, Birmingham, Sheffield, Oxford, Northampton, Brighton, Newcastle,Leeds, York and ends in Salford on 15 March 2020.
Eye as Witness exhibition
The National Holocaust Centre and Museum's , an immersive Virtual Reality (VR) experience, is at the South Hampstead Synagogue, London until 29 March 2020; The Imperial War Museum North in Trafford Park, Greater Manchester until 27 March 2020; the Peace Museum, Bradford until 29 March 2020, the National Arboretum Memorial in Alrewas, Staffordshire from 08 April - 30 June 2020 and at the Lakeside Arts Centre, University Park, Nottingham from January to February 2021.
Image: soldiers taking people from the Warsaw Ghetto to an extermination camp after the Warsaw Ghetto uprising in 1943. (Known as Warsaw Ghetto Boy).
Image credit: National Archives and Records Administration
Eye as Witness exhibition
An image from the National Holocaust Centre's Eye as Witness exhibition - a mother kisses her baby in Lodz Ghetto in 1940
Image credit: (c) Henryk Ross
Courtesy Art Gallery of Ontario
Eye as Witness exhibition
Image: a visitor enters an Eye as Witness image using a VR headset
Image credit:
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- Fri 24 Jan 2020 19:15±«Óãtv Radio 4
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