JP Ahonen - Shadows of Conflict

What happens, when one flees from a conflict zone to another country? In what ways may the conflicts follow to the host countries? What can we learn from cases, where conflicts no longer affect daily life in the new country of residence, and peace prevails among the diaspora communities?

The Shadows of Conflict exhibition is part of the Diascon project, which examines the experiences of diaspora groups in six European countries. Led by Docent Élise Féron from the Tampere Peace Research Institute, the research provides new information on ethnographic relations, conflict and peace, which may benefit both political decision making and the civil society in general. The exhibition features excerpts from refugee interviews, which comic book artist JP Ahonen has adapted into documentary short stories.

JP Ahonen is a Tampere-based comic book artist, illustrator and author of several newspaper strips published in his native Finland. His works have been translated into 13 languages, and he is best known for his black metal mockumentary Belzebubs, which has evolved from a humble self-therapy project into a cross-media phenomenon, interweaving comics, music and animation, with hundreds of thousands of online fans all around the globe. JP is currently developing Belzebubs into an animated series with Pyjama Films and YLE, Finland’s national broadcaster.