Paul Seawright is shortlisted The Zurich Portrait Prize 2020 at National Gallery of Ireland. The Zurich Portrait Prize exhibition will open in the National Gallery of Ireland when it re-opens.
'During the Rwandan genocide of 1994, an estimated one million people were murdered in just 100 days. 25 years after the genocide a unique initiative pairs perpetrators with their victims and supports them to raise a cow together in an effort to reconcile. This image is from a series titled Beasts of Burden; portraits of those convicted of the genocide, those who survived the slaughter and the animals they raise together in a powerful act of reconciliation.' - Paul Seawright
Seawright is a photographer who has drawn heavily on his Northern Irish background to produce searching photographic investigations of aspects of its fraught political terrain, as in his 'Orange Order' and 'Police Force' series from the early 1990s. In his recent work, Seawright has moved away from an overtly Irish context, focusing on what he has termed a 'generic malevolent landscape' represented by the uninhabited spaces at the edge of cities and forests throughout the globe.