Pivot Points: Turkey and London

A new exhibition opens this week in Clerkenwell by Irish photographer Helen Sheehan whose work illustrates her deep commitment to human rights and to issues of exile and belonging.

In Pivot Points, Sheehan shows her latest narrative photomontage work which focuses on two individuals: James and Zehra. Both British citizens based in London, they are coming from very different yet connected experiences.

While Englishman James comes from a materially affluent background, his relationship to the value systems, which led to that wealth, is complex, very critical, and yet also creative. Sheehan’s work with him over some months comes at this tension laterally, juxtaposing imagery of inheritance with his ongoing campaigning on oil and social justice in Eastern Turkey, which Sheehan visited for this project.

Zehra on the other hand worked with Sheehan in London and Istanbul over an intensive period. They explored Zehra’s complicated relationship to her long-term adopted home in London, in light of her family’s persecution for political reasons from the land of her birth, Turkey. Sheehan explores the intensely delicate territory of integration, loyalty, longing, alienation and belonging across the two landscapes that shape her subject’s realities.

The series of photomontages evoke very different lives, yet two lives which grapple with intense complexity about “home”. We get a sense of gaps, of absences, of a kind of searching, yet also of rich, insightful, textured lives. Sheehan’s aesthetic, honed by her years of questioning the borders of photojournalism and art is exquisite and intimate, intense and provoking.

Sheehan has worked on issues of conflict and justice in Belfast, Algeria, France, Bosnia, Croatia and Armenia, and has exhibited in Paris, Croatia, Slovenia , the USA and London.

Pivot Points

YFBS Gallery
207 Whitecross Street
Clerkenwell
EC1 8QP

15 -18 October
Opening hours 9:30am – 5pm

www.helensheehan.com