Switching on compassion

By Rosie Lavan

Descendants of All Worlds
Finsbury Library, St John's Street

IF SOMEBODY mentions the conflict in the Balkans, your first thought might not be of how children managed to get to school each morning during the war. But it’s precisely such everyday events, as they have taken place in some of the world’s most troubled areas, that a new exhibition in Islington encourages visitors to consider.

Descendants of All Worlds, is the latest project from Scotland-based not-for-profit organisation, Heartstone. The exhibition uses photo-documentary to challenge prejudice and combat intolerance.

Sita Kumari, founder of Heartstone, says the project should urge visitors to “see again, to empathise, to see people as people”.

It features photos from the Balkans, a trail of children walking to school under armed guard in Pristina, alongside an image of veiled girls on their first day of school in post 9/11 Afghanistan.

March of the Living, an exhibit to mark Holocaust Memorial Day in January, shows shoes piled high in concentration camps, the mundane remnants of an atrocity. The exhibits will change during the course of the year and display new photos from different parts of the world.

Using community spaces like this marks a departure from the larger exhibitions that Heartstone has concentrated on since its foundation in 1990. This, says Kumari, was deliberate and reflects an attempt to reach a new audience. Larger, more traditional exhibitions were “preaching to the converted” Kumari says: “We knew exactly who was going to walk through the door.”

By taking the work to high profile local sites like libraries and community centres, the art director says they are presenting stories to a different population whom they would not normally reach.

Descendants of All Worlds is running in 50 different locations across the UK. Through the photographs, the exhibition tells many tales. Its aim is to make these tales as easy to relate to as possible - these are ordinary stories that happened to take place in extraordinary circumstances.

It also seeks to combat compassion fatigue; harrowing images of starving people and war-torn places have, in the age of 24-hour news, become more familiar than shocking, and Kumari says this needs to change. “The problem with media coverage is that people switch off.”

It is the human stories that get lost within the news melee that Heartstone wants to tell.