January 26--April 1, 2006, Intermedia Arts, $2 suggested donation
Photography by Abdi Roble, Paul Corbit Brown and Mike Rosen

This exhibition includes powerful graphic imagery depicting violence against humanity.

Public Reception with presentations by the photographers:
Saturday, February 25, 2006, Noon--4:30 pm
Presentation and panel with artists in the theater at 2:00 PM:
What is the value of doing documentary work? How do you balance the "best photo" with keeping the dignity of the subject as primary importance?

We invite the public to respond to "How do you hold on to your culture?". The exhibition has an interactive portion that allows audience/viewers to reflect and write their own responses. Computer available to link to resources related to the exhibit also available.

Against Forgetting: Beyond Genocide and Civil War is a photography exhibit featuring works by Paul Corbit Brown, Abdi Roble and Mike Rosen. Their photos capture Rwanda eleven years post genocide, Somali culture in America and memorials of the Jewish Holocaust. The images bring immigrants, refugees and the past to our doorsteps and remind us that people continue to struggle to survive and overcome war and genocide.

Paul Corbit Brown, former contributor to the Washington Post, traveled to Rwanda on a fellowship to document the people and their stories of survival eleven years after the brutal genocide between the Hutus and Tutsis. His goal was to "attempt to understand the long-term effects of the horrendous act of genocide as well as the resiliency of a people struggling to overcome the past and forge a new future." Through his work, he hopes that "we will all learn to grow a culture of peace in our own homes, communities, countries, and on this whirling orb we all call home." He is passionately committed to producing images that further the goals of human rights, social justice and environmental responsibility. Brown was able to go to Rwanda with the aid of the Upper Midwest Human Rights Fellowship Program administered by the University of Minnesota Human Rights Center funded by the Otto Bremer Foundation.

Abdi Roble's photographs entitled The Somali Diaspora are a part of the Somali Documentary Project, whose mission is to use photography to produce an archival record of the members of the Somali Diaspora while they are still engaging in the cultural practices of their homeland. Its hope is that this record will draw international attention to the plight of Somalia, educate Americans about these new immigrants and provide Somalis with a photographic record of their early experience in this country. Abdi Roble feels a responsibility to give Somali immigrants coherence through this photographic project that their homeland is not able to provide.

The involvement of the Somali Documentary Project and Abdi Roble is made possible in partnership with Arts Midwest, the Ohio Arts Council and the International Education Center.

On a recent trip to Eastern Europe, Mike Rosen visited the Auschwitz/Birkenau concentration camp complex near Krakow, Poland. His photos portray the Jewish Holocaust through empty gas cans, gas chambers and buildings, which serve as a reminder that life ends and life goes on. "Even though I'd already experienced the heart-wrenching exhibits at the Holocaust Museum in Washington D.C. and Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, I felt that, as a Jew who undoubtedly has many ancestors that perished in the Holocaust, I wanted to see first-hand the scale and monstrosity of this most notorious of the Nazi death camps."