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Art
Summit│Forward│Peace and the Artists│Absolutism
Welcome to PACA Workshop
Workshops organised by The Pan African Circle
of Artists as part of its effort at creating sustainable awareness for art
and culture and their socialising implication in our societies.
Foreword
PACA's 2001 Peace Day at
Institute of Management and Technology, Enugu
The concept and pursuit
of peace are co-eval with human society. The modern world has gone
through multiple gory experiences which have fore-grounded the
indispensability of peace to the continuance of society, the
perpetuation of mankind, and even the quest for immortality.
Much as peace, it seems, continues to elude the highly harassed modern
world, it remains one of the artist’s most enduring themes, be it in
music, poetry, or the visual arts. This is obvious, especially if art is
seen as the contemplation of truth, even when it is employed in the
dangerous service of politics. Thus art itself becomes a variant of
peace; for when the dynamics and revolutions of politics and science
torment the world, art has always been the antidote, the cleansing
ritual. Little wonder, then, that artists should focus on peace in such
an open annual workshop.
When I first proposed the PACA Annual Peace Workshop in 1999 as our
contribution to the global effort at the enthronement of peace as a
means to the amelioration of the human condition and the perpetuation of
the human race, I met with stout opposition from some of my associates
who could not “understand why artists should be made to gather for a
subject so trivial as peace”! But after visiting Hiroshima in 2001 and
seeing Japan’s inspiring attitude to the unforgettable, titanic tragedy
of August 6, 1945, I am more convinced than ever that the committed
artist must function as the conscience of his society and that art can
heal the wounds inflicted by the flux and flame of politics. This is
what the PACA-Peace workshop hopes to demonstrate, and it is my earnest
hope that it shall soon become a truly annual event, one that both the
artists and the troubled public would look up to every year.
C. Krydz Ikwuemesi,
(painter, theorist),
International Secretary,
The Pan-African Circle of Artists
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