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Katrine Bregengaard is co-founder of the 1949 Human Rights Exhibition Project hosted by the Institute for the Study of Human Rights at Columbia University. She holds an MA in Human Rights from Columbia University and a BA in Philosophy from Copenhagen University. Her interests lie in the field of cultural and critical theoretical approaches to the study of human rights, with a particular focus on visual and historical representation of human rights in museums and exhibitions. Awarded Columbia’s Institute for the Study of Human Rights Research Stipend, Bregengaard conducted original archival research at the UNESCO Archives in Paris 2012, which eventually gave rise to the 1949 Human Rights Exhibition Project.
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Eva Prag co-founded the 1949 Human Rights Exhibition Project in August 2013 at Columbia’s Institute for the Study of Human Rights. She holds a dual Master’s degree in International History from Columbia University and LSE. A recipient of the Columbia University Alliance Fellowship, Prag wrote her Master’s thesis on American understandings of the Cambodian genocide in relation to the memory of the Vietnam War, the emergence of the Human Rights Movement, and Holocaust consciousness in the late 1970s and 1980s.
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VISUALIZING UNIVERSALISM: A NEW EXHIBITION
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UNESCO’s Human Rights Exhibition was the first international event that sought to visually represent the history, meaning and content of the rights set out in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), adopted one year prior by the United Nations General Assembly. The exhibition was composed of photographic imagery, documents and artwork submitted by nation states and curated by a group of experts, who themselves struggled to pin down exactly what human rights meant. In September 1949 the exhibition opened at Musée Galliéra in Paris whereafter it travelled in an album version from 1949-1953 to countries in Europe, Asia and Latin America. The exhibition imagery was organized in accordance with the thirty articles of the UDHR, and can as such be described as the first ‘Visual Declaration of Human Rights.’ This new project remounts the original exhibition in a contemporary context, in order to tell the fascinating story it contains and open up for debate the many questions it raises. This meta-exhibition titled Visualizing Universalism will open in April 2014 at Columbia University’s Buell Hall Gallery and will particularly focus on the importance of historical narratives in giving meaning and content to the ideas set out in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
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