Picturing Moral Courage: The Rescuers

Picturing Moral Courage: The Rescuers (also exhibited under the name of "Ordinary Heroes") is an exhibition that focuses on rescuer behaviour during times of genocide in Rwanda, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Cambodia and Holocaust Europe. The practice of designing this exhibition highlighted the complex nature of designing 'difficult knowledge' exhibitions, and in particular the interpretive processes of designers when creating the typographic representations of people's testimonies of lived traumas in two different languages. This exhibition is the focus of an upcoming paper that will be published in The Design Journal's special edition on visual communication in the Balkans in December 2015 (Wahlin & Kahn 2015). The paper examines the role of designers within the difficult exhibition field of practice, and proposes a conceptual theoretical model of analysis that combines critical hermeneutics with multimodal, social semiotics, to assist in the interpretive process of designers, as well as enhance communication between curatorial team members.