Keeping Them Othered
Keeping Them Othered brings together installation, moving image, sound, text, and immersive media to examine political violence, inherited trauma, displacement, and the unstable architectures through which memory and power are produced. The works explore how histories of colonialism, occupation, and collective trauma persist—not as isolated events, but as recurring structures that continue to shape perception, emotion, and everyday life.
At the centre of the exhibition is You Never Know When It Will Explode, an immersive virtual reality film and spatial sound work developed through an ongoing dialogue with Palestinian writer and journalist Qasem Waleed. The project marks Helga Fannon's first sustained engagement with virtual reality, 3D modelling, photogrammetry, spatial video, and 360° sound, embracing experimentation, improvisation, and technical uncertainty as integral to its methodology.
Rather than employing immersive technology as spectacle, the work approaches VR as a space for reflecting on grief, witnessing, distance, and political rupture. The film features a spoken reading by Qasem Waleed, recorded in Gaza. The work was inspired by Waleed's text I Am Stuck in a Box Like Schrödinger's Cat and his reflections on quantum physics, which became an important conceptual point of departure for the project.
Rooted in experimentation and interdisciplinary thinking, Keeping Them Othered reflects on the cyclical nature of colonialism and the ways systems of violence continually reconfigure themselves across time. It asks how we witness one another across distance, conflict, and loss, and whether memory and grief continue to reverberate long after events have seemingly passed.
You Never Know When It Will Explode was part-funded by Arts Council England and is available to experience in VR upon request.