‘Images as agents for sharing collective memories of historical traumas across generations – Short Stories about War: Women

Conference – academic paper, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, October 1 – 2, 2026

Iwona Abrams presented an academic paper ‘Images as agents for sharing collective memories of historical traumas across generations – Short Stories about War: Women at the Seventeenth International Conference on The Image. This paper examines how practice-based artistic research can operate as a method for investigating the transmission of collective trauma through visual forms. Drawing on the project Two Short Stories about War: Men / Women, it explores how personal testimony, archival absence, and constructed imagery can be translated into a visual language that mediates, rather than directly represents, historical violence. The study focuses on the suppressed history of wartime sexual violence in Upper Silesia (Poland) at the end of the Second World War and considers how such histories persist across generations through acts of sharing and reinterpretation. The central research question guiding this paper is: how can practice-based artistic methods transform personal testimony into visual forms that enable the transmission of collective trauma without reproducing the spectacle of violence? The paper argues that artistic practice generates knowledge through processes of translation, abstraction, and spatial constellation. Through the transformation of voice into visual and material form, the project develops what is termed a material grammar of trauma, in which meaning emerges through repetition, fragmentation, and embodied engagement. By situating the work within debates on cultural memory, trauma transmission and the ethics of representation, the paper demonstrates how artistic practice can function as a critical mode of enquiry into the construction and circulation of historical knowledge.

The conference hosted by Nanyang Technological University, Singapore and organised by The Image Research Network was brought together around a shared interest in the nature and function of image-making and images. The conference’s Special Focus—The Image as Advocate: Shaping Cultural Conversations featured presentations by a range of international speakers and invited participants to consider how visual media function as agents of cultural dialogue, activism, and change.