I Couldn’t Stand By Exhibition at the SOAS Gallery
Louise Van Randwyck, BA History of Art and Social Anthropology
A picture can paint a thousand words, and that’s exactly what PositiveNegatives achieved in their latest exhibition, I Couldn’t Stand By, at The SOAS Gallery. The organisation, founded by SOAS alumnus Dr Benjamin Worku-Dix, aims to transform academic research into comics and animations, allowing scholarship to become accessible to a wider audience. The animations and comics allow research to achieve a legacy beyond academic journals.
The exhibition consists of a number of cartoon panels portraying how young people in Columbia and Algeria are working to establish peace in the aftermath of conflict. Lifeworlds Learning works in collaboration with PositiveNegatives on a two to four year journey, depending on the research in question, which allows academics to aptly convey their findings into pieces that encourage conversation and critical thinking. The comics act as a ‘shop window’ for research they portray, as described by Dr Worku-Dix, encouraging viewers to look into the research on a deeper level. By portraying the faces of individuals, who may become lost in the details of an ethnographic research paper, the human element becomes the focus. PositiveNegatives also attempt to work with artists who are connected to the culture of the research - for example potentially a Nepalese artist to work on an animation on research taking place in Kathmandu.
Dr Worku-Dix began the organisation after creating Vanni, a graphic novel that covers the experiences of Sri Lankan families and their experiences of the conflicts from 2004 - 2008. Whilst he previously worked as a photojournalist during this time, cartoon and animation allows a viewer to enter spaces where photography is impossible, e.g. torture. The use of cartoons in the SOAS gallery exhibition means that when the viewer later engages with the written work, they do so with an image of a person already in mind, creating a deeper human connection to the stories and ideas being presented.
The organisation holds workshops across a number of UK schools. Whilst they held some at the exhibition Stories of Migration last year, this year SOAS has granted funding for the organisation to hold workshops relating to I Couldn’t Stand By within the schools themselves allowing up to 3 two hour workshops to be held within a day. The next step in the organisation is to not only translate the animations linguistically, but culturally too.
The exhibition I Couldn’t Stand By is running until 21st March 2026, making it well worth visiting it on the first floor of the SOAS gallery. Cartoon depictions of young people greet you as you climb the stairs, whilst their stories and impacts on their respective communities surround you once you enter the corridor of the exhibition space. The intimate space of the exhibition immerses you, as the people within the cartoons invite you into how they are able to start to build normalcy and stability back into their everyday lives.
