Join us for the opening of the new exhibition 'If You Knew Me. If You Knew Yourself. You Would Not Kill Me.' by former official British War Artist John Keane. On view will be a series of new paintings produced in response to the commemoration of the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, following Keane’s recent investigations of the country’s Lieux de Mémoire or Sites of Memory.

Keane is currently Artist in Residence at the School of International Relations, University of St Andrews. He visited Rwanda in 2015 with a group of postgraduate students of Peace and Conflict Studies, led by Dr Hazel Cameron. The visit, which was designed to examine the causes and legacy of the genocide, took Keane to several of the many locations around the country where more than 800,000 people were slaughtered in the space of 100 days, to meet both survivors, and perpetrators still serving their sentences in prison.

Large numbers of Lieux de Mémoire, present throughout the Rwandan countryside, serve as both formal and unofficial public memorials to the victims, often in the form of visceral displays of human remains, or clothes and personal possessions. Working in response to the imagery found within the sites, Keane has developed a body of work that reflects upon the role of collective memory in the recovery of a post-conflict society.