Front Row

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Front Row: Pet Shop Boys, Emotional risk taking  in the arts, The Eye As Witness

24/01/2020

Pet Shop Boys, Emotional risk taking  in the arts, The Eye As Witness

BBC Radio 4 - Front Row, Pet Shop Boys, Emotional risk taking  in the arts, The Eye As Witness

The Pet Shop Boys talk about their new album Hotspot.

Stig talks to the Pet Shop Boys about their new studio album Hotspot and in our continuing series on risk in the arts discusses emotional risk with Louise Allen and Ahir Shah.

The Pet Shop Boys talk about their highly anticipated new studio album Hotspot, which is released today. Hotspot is the duo’s final release with producer Stuart Price who ushered in a period of ‘electronic purism’ in their work. Recorded using a large amount of analogue equipment, Hotspot is a departure from the Pet Shop Boy’s recent hyper dance pop sound.

Front Row's series examining risk in the arts focuses today on emotional risk. What is it like for writers and performers to explore their own personal backgrounds and issues and then to go public with their revelations and confessions, and how much has that changed in recent years? Louise Allen addresses the challenge of putting her experiences of an abusive childhood in foster care onto the page in her memoir Thrown Away Child, and stand-up Ahir Shah discusses drawing on his own personal mental health issues in his stage act.

Next Monday is International Holocaust Remembrance Day, and the 75th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp. We are all familiar with images of victims of the Holocaust. Most of these, though, were actually taken by the Nazis for propaganda purposes and to create a historical record. The Eye as Witness , a new touring exhibition organised by The National Holocaust Centre and Museum, challenges these views. Professor Maiken Umbach explains how, using virtual reality technology, viewers can enter into a photograph to experience how it was framed and, crucially, what is not shown, including the photographer taking the picture. The exhibition focuses, too, on photographs taken, at enormous risk, by the inmates of the ghettoes and camps. Some of these images were buried and retrieved once the war was over. They reveal, amidst degradation and evil, a zest for life, humanity and love.

Presenter: Stig Abell
Producer: Hilary Dunn

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