IWM Contemporary: Imogen Stidworthy, Imperial War Museum

Imogen Stidworthy’s sound installation for the Imperial War Museum builds on her stellar career exploring how the manipulation of sound transforms our perception of the world. For the most part an Imogen Stidworthy biography reads like a rising star - a Liverpool-based artist who won the Liverpool art prize in 2008 and has exhibited internationally at Documenta 12 and the Shanghai Biennale. 
Imperial War Museum exhibition
Her new piece, ‘The Work v5’, was developed through conversations with two former British soldiers suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder and one of their wives, who lives with the effects of war at home. Stidworthy pieces together their voices through objects associated with conflict, exploring the nature of memory and the difficulty of communicating trauma. The method of realizing speech through objects also lends her subjects’ voices a curiously physical presence.
The Imperial War Museum, London's best history museum, hits us with these intimate stories of military conflict. At the same time, it offers no moral judgement: these preserved conversations are unadulterated and leave the audience to draw their own conclusions.
In the year that marks the 70^th anniversary of VE day, Stidworthy’s reminds us how important it is to preserve the experiences of history.