Darfur/Darfur Exhibit at the ICA

The Darfur/Darfur Exhibit will be at the Institute of Contemporary Art on Friday, September 7, in the Barbara Lee Family Foundation Theater. The exhibit of photographs will run from 10 am to 3 pm and is free with regular admission. Tickets to the lecture and Yo-Yo Ma performance are already sold out, but you will be able to hear it outside the ICA.

Sometimes "awareness-raising" only goes so far, especially when it comes to Darfur. As much as we hear "Save Darfur" and see the T-shirts, nothing seems to happen to help these people who are being slaughtered. However, the ICA's "Darfur/Darfur" exhibit will present large-scale photographs of what life is really like there instead of T-shirt logos and images of a concerned-looking Angelina Jolie.

From 10 am to 3 pm, the images will loop on a large screen as "Sudanese-inspired" music plays. Then, from 7:00 to 8:30 pm, Samantha Power, Director of the Carr Center for Human Rights at Harvard and Pulitzer Prize winner, will give the keynote address. Susannah Sirkin, Deputy Director of Cambridge-based Physicians for Human Rights and Michal Ronnen Safdie, a local photographer, will also speak. Yo-Yo Ma will wrap things up. It's not clear where Yo-Yo Ma fits into an exhibit on Darfur, but, hey, it's nice he's performing.

Regarding Power, we hear she's excellent. Our commenters schooled us about her when we did not give her proper due before she participated in a discussion of Dave Eggers' What is the What. To quote one of them, "The Pulitzer Prize winner who took time off from teaching at the Kennedy School to advise Barack Obama on foreign affairs? And writes occasional opinion pieces in the Globe about the Sox? Recognize." Indeed we do!

If you couldn't get tickets to the lectures and the performance, you can watch it through the theater's glass walls, and it will be broadcast outside the ICA. Then, you can go to Putnam Investments Plaza between 8:30 and 10:00. The Berklee College of Music Voices of Mercy will perform original music written to raise awareness about Darfur.

Photograph from Michal Ronnen Safdie.