Nowruz/New Day at Touchstones Rochdale
Creative Tourist
Since 2009, with the support of the Art Fund, the British Museum and the V&A have been assembling an important collection of contemporary photography focusing on the Middle East: the Art Fund Collection of Middle Eastern Photography.
In 2016, Touchstones Rochdale was invited to curate an exhibition drawn from this collection. In recent years Rochdale has become home to a large number of people seeking refuge from countries across the Middle East. In light of this, the gallery invited Global Conversations, a group of refugees who meet on a weekly basis at nearby St. Chad’s Church, to co-curate the exhibition. Nowruz/New Day presents the results of this unique collaboration and poses a range of critical questions about the collection and, more generally, how the Middle East is presented through the media.
