Dear Diary: A Celebration of Diaries and their Digital Descendants

Description

Co-curated with Dr Polly North of the Great Diary Project, DEAR DIARY highlights how diaries stage important issues for the individual and society, including those of identity, intimacy, privacy, secrecy, therapy, self-expression, self-improvement, memory and witnessing. Celebrating a wide range of diaries past and present, Dear Diary shows the diary form is alive and well in the digital age. Specially-commissioned film interviews with living diarists, by artist Derek Eland, reveal how diaries are meaningful to people now. Diaries are important tools for refugees, for whom written and video diaries may help restore voiced and visible subjectivity: can we stand in their shoes for a day? Diarists selected from the Great Diary Project's collection include: an early eighteenth-century, dolphin-eating Cornish tin miner; a film-star obsessed hitchhiker; an ambitious amateur actor; girl/boy-mad teenagers and a rabbit-devoted schoolboy. They join a cast of digital diarists and lifeloggers whose voices prove profound, prosaic and surprising. Diaries give unique accounts of individual lives, offer interpretations of the world and add new and thought-provoking dimensions to social history. The exhibition is a collaboration between King’s College London’s Centre for Life-Writing Research and The Great Diary Project, presented by Cultural Programming at King’s. It also draws on the expertise of the European Research Council-funded Ego Media research group at King’s.

Period	25 May 2017 → 7 Jul 2017
Event title	Dear Diary : A Celebration of Diaries and their Digital Descendants
Event type	Exhibition
Location	London , United KingdomShow on map