FIONA WHELAN TALKS ABOUT THE ONGOING PROJECT ‘NATURAL HISTORY OF HOPE’ AND EXAMINES SOME OF ITS HISTORICAL ROOTS AND TENSIONS.

In a 2012 lecture, Tom Finkerpearl used Monty Python’s popular 1979 satirical film The Life of Brian to illustrate a point about a crisis in the art world. [1] At an angry confrontation between the People’s Front of Judea, which the character of Brian had joined, and another activist group, the Campaign for a Free Galilee, Brian calls out to suggest that they should in fact be fighting their common enemy: the Romans. Finkerpearl uses this comedy moment to highlight a tendency in the art world to become consumed in ideological arguments pitting one form of creative approach against another at the cost of a collective fight.

Drawing on Paul Starr’s article ‘The Phantom Community’, he describes historical social change movements that adopted an ‘exemplary’ position, such as Mahatma Ghandi or Martin Luther King, and those in the ‘adversarial’ category, such as Malcolm X. [2] Finkerpearl sees these distinct positions in the history of social movements as key to understanding the modes of response to contemporary issues that we see today in the art world. He describes the adversarial approach as part of the genealogy for antagonistic practices like that of Santiago Sierra, while cooperative works such as Rick Lowe’s ‘Project Row Houses’ or Tania Brugeura’s ‘Immigrant Movement International’ find their roots in the exemplary.

For over 12 years I’ve worked as an artist in residence at Rialto Youth Project (RYP), creating long-term artistic enquiries building layers of individual and organisational relationships and coauthoring collaborative works. This work has clear roots on the side of the exemplary. But rather than create binaries of adversarial versus exemplary, antagonism versus cooperation, rupture versus healing, Finkerpearl argues that, like Brian, we should in fact be fighting the Romans, or whoever our common enemy is.

If we imagine the patriarchy, neo-liberalism or capitalism as common enemies that might unite many artists, then we could agree that a breakdown into micro discourses and debates over forms and approaches would be distracting from the broader fight against such mammoth forces. For example, for the last four years I’ve worked on a durational collaborative project, ‘Natural History of Hope’, exploring class and gender inequality across different generations of women. Therefore, I am part of a contemporary community of artists in Ireland who are preoccupied with related themes and who all engage people as a core feature of their work. From the Artists Repeal the Eighth and Waking the Feminists activist campaigns to the transnational In the Shadow of the State project, the recent controversial Maser mural that temporarily adorned the outer wall of Project Arts Centre and the participatory ‘77 Women’ project at Richmond Barracks.

All of these address common issues around patriarchy and collectively present a challenge to a common enemy. [3] However, in reality these art processes are each complex and multifaceted. Each one identifies and opposes different aspects of patriarchal systems. Furthermore they employ different forms, different modes of engagement and different timescales. The have different aims, different levels of endorsement from the art world, and different relationships with their constituencies as voluntary and involuntary participants, collaborators and spectators. Reducing them to one common fight poses the risk of sweeping over the complexity of their own power relations.

Instead, we can momentarily sidestep the history of social movements and simultaneously track back through the multiple genealogies of participation in the arts, such as Dadaism, Fluxus, the Feminist art movement or Relational Aesthetics. This way we can identify some specific features that place different approaches distinctly apart from each other and contribute to current debates related to their specific values and fault lines. [4] For example a close examination of the community arts movement of the 1970s – 1990s offers a deeper understanding of current debates on the instrumentalisation and gentrification of participatory art practices.

As Claire Bishop outlined at the ‘Creative Time Summit’ in 2011, participation has changed throughout history from the ‘crowd’ of the 1910s, to the ‘masses’ of the 20s, the ‘people’ of the 60s, the ‘excluded’ of the 80s, the ‘communities’ of 90s, to today’s ‘volunteers’. [5] In a recent essay that I co-wrote with sociologist Kevin Ryan examining my practice, Ryan highlights how the language of power was radically altered during the 1980s and 1990s, both in Ireland and the EC, and the effect of this on the community arts movement. [6] What had started out as a deeply political set of practices motivated by issues of ‘inequality’ and fights for ‘equality’, over time and through state involvement, became reframed using the language of ‘disadvantage’ and social ‘exclusion’. The remedy thus prescribed was social ‘inclusion’. Neo-liberal workfare regimes emerged and participation became scripted. Fights for equality were replaced by state supported processes aimed at ‘activating’ and ‘empowering’ ‘disadvantaged’ individuals and communities, the movement becoming increasingly controlled.

During this time, while youth work was being steered by policies with minimal focus on inequality, some organisations, including RYP, refused to endorse the depoliticised language in the state’s classification of Rialto as ‘disadvantaged’. Instead RYP adopted the defiant language of ‘oppression’ and ‘marginalisation’ while building a strong capacity for arts-based work committed to the exploration and representation of social issues. [7] My engagement with RYP from 2004 created a dialogue between legacies of community arts and contemporary critical discourses occupying the field of collaborative and socially engaged practice, especially as they related to power.

Cautious of becoming instrumentalised but deeply respectful of a history of community-based arts activity in Rialto, I worked to avoid what Grant Kester refers to as the “salvage” paradigm in which the artist takes on the task of “improving” the implicitly flawed subject. [8] Seeing the distinction between acting upon and acting with, [9] I invested in deeply collaborative structures and in the spirit of Ranciere’s ‘ignorant schoolmaster’, equality became a starting point rather than a destination of the work. [10]

The current ‘Natural History of Hope’ project has been focused on exploring and representing contemporary equality issues in women’s lives. It has brought together generations of women working and living in Rialto to engage over time in story gathering as well as a series of local events, meals, workshops, the development of a temporary school and three major public performances in the theatre space at Project Arts Centre in May 2016. [11] While a previous project exploring power with young people had quickly identified policing as a strong theme to pursue, ‘Natural History of Hope’ unveiled multiple overlapping realities of class and gender inequality. As a result the public performances involved a cast of 30 women representing this complexity, using lived experience and external analysis to speak back to multiple oppressive forces. Themes of class, death, the liability of men, gendered identity, lack of safe space, struggle for dignity and the ‘affective domain’ were interwoven into a landscape in which the protagonist, a mannequin called Hope, would attempt to survive and if possible to thrive. [12] Complex social themes could not be simplified here as they crashed against each other in a young woman’s path. The cast presented themselves as powerful women, yearning for something better for Hope. Presenting this work in a contemporary art venue during the centenary year, and in light of the Waking the Feminists campaign, created other lenses for the work and highlighted key questions around the power and representation of working class experience. [13]

In my practice I strive to bring together two forms of relational power, “one that articulates inequalities between those who exercise power and those who are subject to power and another whereby power is co-produced through collaboration”. [14] In that vein, this project has nurtured a strong collaborative power base and so, as with previous projects, it remains open ended in anticipation of future chapters. Although I’ve built up a distinct methodology, what is significant for me as an artist is that I’m not bound to any specific approach in moving forward. Future phases of ‘Natural History of Hope’ may adopt different approaches at different moments where necessary. What I do find myself eager to hold open is the complexity of life in the social world and similarly to keep alive the natural tensions that occur between various positions and complex approaches to making art with people. It’s in the richness of this complexity that new knowledge is produced.

Fiona Whelan is a Dublin-based artist and joint Coordinator of the MA Socially Engaged Art at NCAD.

fionawhelan.com

Image: ‘Natural History of Hope’ performance, Project Arts Centre, May 2016, photo by Ray Hegarty.

[1] ‘Creative Time Summit’, New York, 12 October 2012.

[2] Paul Starr, ‘The Phantom Community’ in John Case and Rosemary Taylor, eds., Co-ops, Communes and Collectives: Social Experiments from the 1960s and 1970s, Pantheon, 1979.

[3] artistsrepealthe8th.com / wakingthefeminists.org / intheshadowofthestate.org / https://www.facebook.com/MASERART/ https://www.richmondbarracks.ie/women-1916/commemoration-quilt/.

[4] In Semester 1 of the MA Socially Engaged Art at NCAD, I coordinate a module mapping the multiple genealogies of socially engaged art practice, delivered by a diverse group of practitioners who each track a specific historical thread.

[5] Claire Bishop, Participation and Spectacle: Where Are We Now?, ‘Creative Time Summit’, 18 May 2011.

[6] Fiona Whelan, Kevin Ryan, Beating the Bounds of Socially-Engaged Art? A Transdisciplinary Dialogue on a Collaborative Art Project with Youth in Dublin, Ireland, Field Journal, Issue 4, Spring 2016 (https://field-journal.com).

[7] rialtoyouthproject.net

[8] Grant Kester, ‘Dialogical Aesthetics: A Critical Framework for Littoral Art’, Variant (9, Winter, 1999/2000); J. Clifford, ‘The Others: Beyond the “Salvage” Paradigm’, Third Text, 1989.

[9] Kevin Ryan makes this distinction, see note 6.

[10] J. Ranciere, The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation, Stanford University Press, California, 1987.

[11] Natural History of Hope was a live performance by Fiona Whelan, Rialto Youth Project and Brokentalkers, Project Arts Centre 12 – 14 May 2016.

[12] Professor Kathleen Lynch from Equality Studies in UCD acted as an advisor to the project and worked with us to identify these core themes from the research material.

[13] See Sarah Keating, ‘When feminism met real working-class lives in Rialto’, Irish Times, 28 June 2016.

[14] Kevin Ryan, see note 6.

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The author has more power over their work than their participants. If we are troubled by the presence of power here, we might feel tempted to abolish the practices of authorship altogether – emboldened, perhaps, by a misapplication of concept of the ‘death of the author’ – where instead there needs to be more traffic between author and reader.”

Aideen Barry’s work Silent Moves has recently won the ‘Modern Ireland in 100 Artworks’ poll for the year 2015 following its nomination and public vote in the Irish Times, beating off extremely stiff competition in the process. This is a testament to the impact well executed and rigorously formulated works like this can have on the general public. In her article, Aideen recounts her personal struggles, prior to this project, with being positioned as an artist in volatile, precarious situations and how this has informed her approach to working in the participatory field.

I invited Fiona Whelan to write on her methodology for the project ‘Natural History of Hope’, a collaborative project that explores class and gender inequality across different generations of women. She highlights the reality of these art processes, which engage people as a core feature and are each complex and multifaceted. She alludes to Claire Bishop’s observation at ‘Creative Time Summit’ 2011 on the evolution of participation throughout history from the ‘crowd’ of the 1910s, to the ‘masses’ of the 1920s, the ‘people’ of the 1960s, the ‘excluded’ of the 1980s, the ‘communities’ of 1990s, to today’s ‘volunteers’.

Developing an art project from a voluntary act was the course of action for Clodagh Emoe when formulating ‘The Plurality of Existence…’ Setting up a weekly gardening project with Spirasi, a humanitarian, intercultural, non-governmental organisation who work with asylum seekers, refugees and other disadvantaged migrant groups operated as a strategy to introduce herself and her ideas to this community. This weekly activity nurtured a trust within the group and laid the groundwork for recounting memories and writing poems that developed into sound transmissions and gallery installations.

The legacy and ownership of participatory works is an ongoing concern not only for the artist, but also for the community/participants involved. Michael McLoughlin’s project ‘Cumann’ addresses this issue through the formation of a ‘power of veto’ where participants act as custodians and arbitrators of the work they were involved in the creation of. They ultimately make all decisions over the presentation and delivery of the work and are consulted on its future.

The levels of participation and its expansive interpretation vary across each of the projects highlighted in this issue. Rhona Byrne and Yvonne McGuinness were awarded a major public art commission from Fingal County Council Arts Office to create work as part of their centenary programme.  An intensive process of delivering 20 workshops to 500 people led to the development of the content, the making of props, and the creation of the final performances of ‘Mobile Monuments’. Three trikes were fabricated to deliver and transport these platforms for performances, echoing the slow networking and passing of information in the lead up to the 1916 Rising.

Participation in art might best be understood as an ethical ‘solution’ to art’s crisis of legitimation. However, participation can only appear as a solution if we forget that art’s actants exist only within art’s various forms of institutions, including local authorities, the custodians of the Per Cent for Art Scheme. Institutional critique, too, must occur within the physical or discursive horizon of the institution. This leads to a paradoxical situation for the ethics of participation. While participation appears to be the antidote to institutionalisation it can also, one would hope, be an instrument of institutional power.

Linda Shevlin is an independent curator and artist based in Roscommon.

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Ards Arts Centre, 5 – 14 August

‘Creative Peninsula’ doesn’t operate like a curated exhibition because it isn’t one. It bears mentioning yet seems obtuse to point out, given that exhibition making isn’t really what this collection of work is about. ‘Creative Peninsula’ is a yearly presentation by Ards and North Down local authority, the premise of which is simply to showcase artists and makers within the area. As a result, the work within it is hugely diverse in focus, media and rigour. However, as is often seen in similar wide reaching events – studio collective exhibitions, for example, or final-year student presentations – grouping practices solely on shared geography is not enough to make something more than the sum of its parts. Thus ‘Creative Peninsula’ is more a disjointed collection of solo voices than a cohesive exhibition.

The location-based survey can, however, be a useful way to take a place’s artistic temperature, and maybe observe how a particular area has affected those that work within it. With all participants working from the Ards and North Down area, the strong impact of the area’s natural, coastal landscape is obvious. Tertiary palettes, organic forms, beach scenes and local wildlife are prevalent in this spectrum of painting, sculpture, craft, poetry, jewellery and furniture pieces.

The show opens with a selection of work loosely based on the sea, represented in textile weaving, printmaking, relief sculpture and paint. Andrew Haire’s painting Gígjökull, while clearly not referencing the local coastline, fits into this subset. This work has a slightly less traditional approach to the theme, with thick layers of paint and yellow flecks giving the overcast shoreline a muggy, greasy feel. It has a similar atmosphere to Cecilia Stephens’s Intrepid Voyagers, a textile image of the landscape with a comparably murky quality, formed in the layers of the weaving. Rosy Ennis’s Phytoplankton monochrome screen print is also distinctive, recalling an illustration in an old biology textbook of a view of microscopic life.

In an exhibition heavily rooted in intricate craft and traditional art, the ceramic works of Patricia Miller’s Bogland Bowl, Victoria Bentham’s Locus Amoenis and Alan McCluney’s Trio of Vessels stand out though the strength of their organic, deeply-toned coloured combinations and delicate textural contrasts. Though the starting point is the vessel form, they are more sculptural than utilitarian.

In contrast, Sally Houston’s sculpture What We Hear takes a found-object approach to the medium, using shards of smashed crockery that pour into the ear of a simple whitewashed head shape. While the piece feels more like a physical sketch for a future, fully-resolved work, this approach to making – incorporating found and unexpected materials – allows for the work to relate to something otherwise absent in the somewhat forensic arts centre space. Owen Crawford’s Worm Got The Bird is another example of this: it is a simple, smoothly carved bird made with dark wood, set against a rust-stained cylinder of rough-hewn found concrete. Set apart from the interior and given something to grind against, this approach creates tension and separates the work from conventional ideas of craft and its domestic place.

In this mostly figurative collection, the works that demonstrate experimentation and abstracted materials grab attention. Nonetheless, there is plenty of impressive draughtsmanship on display. The frenetic energy in Watchful Hare, a bold charcoal drawing by Elaine Burke, has a feel of the animal’s nervous character, while on the opposite end of the spectrum, Lee Boyd’s Moonlight Becomes You is a detailed, skilfully rendered anthropomorphic pencil drawing. Dennis Healey’s Rising Model/Red on Blue, initially appearing a solely abstract work, slowly reveals human forms through six repeated red and blue digital prints. Craig Jefferson’s Camel and Mirror Still Life operates in a similar way; with the thickly applied oil paint, the artist uses the subject matter tangentially, focusing on composition and colour while the odd figurative element slowly reveals itself to the viewer.

‘Creative Peninsula’ is a mixed exhibition of professional artists and those perhaps only starting out in their creative practice. There’s nothing inherently wrong with this, especially given the purpose of the show, yet as a whole the exhibition might benefit from a more specific selection process, an express theme to consider, or at the very least a larger exhibition space. There are 59 pieces in an area that would more comfortably house a third of this number. The result is a lack of breathing room for each work. It is also difficult to get a good sense of what’s there, with nothing to represent each artist but a list of names, titles and prices. Furthermore, featuring some artists working in film, installation, photography, performance or digital media within the area would have added to the exhibition. Perhaps criticising the show for not being curated is too easy and dismisses the purpose of this type of exhibition. Still, in order to work with what’s on display and not against it, it’s clear that those curatorial values are still needed.

Dorothy Hunter is an artist and writer based in Belfast.

Images: Owen Crawford, Worm Got the Bird; Lindsay Press,The Flock.

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Selected from an open call for applications and commissioned by Queen’s University Belfast, Capillarium (2016) by Kevin Killen is a work located outside the recently-built Wellcome-Wolfson Institute for Experimental Medicine, an interdisciplinary research centre building on the Health Sciences campus.

A self-portrait of sorts, Killen created the design for Capillarium by mapping small blood vessels in his eye into a new pattern, reminiscent of the intricate micro vascular networks found inside the body: “My process involves working with a degree of chance; reflection, mapping and repetitive forms all play a part in the photographic drawings, as I develop the singular pattern to a point where a new complete pattern emerges.” This pattern was laser cut into mild steel fashioned into a hollow sculptural sphere slightly exceeding the average head height of a student at Queen’s. It is solidly constructed and undoubtedly demonstrates an understanding of the qualities of the material used.

Aesthetically, Capillarium is instantly recognisable as relating to the body. Its branch-like organic motif and orbital shape resemble various internal structures; its surface is the colour of blood. The title is derived from vasorum capillarium, Latin for ‘capillaries’ – the fine branching network of blood vessels that connect arteries and veins. The sculpture’s industrial finish appears wipe-clean and hygienic like a piece of medical equipment. Capillarium makes visible the internal structures inside each of us with the impassive, clinical directness of a 3D scientific model found in a biology classroom. 

Capillaries generate continuous production and exchange water, oxygen, carbon dioxide and many other substances between our blood and our tissues at a molecular level every second of our waking lives. Capillarium’s stark simplicity avoids the presence of these complex, invisible, uncontrollable and incomprehensible interior processes. Its rigid, empty structure provides a description of the aesthetics of the body that is antithetical to the dark, bewildering, fleshy, moist, bloody, entropic mess within.

The study of the inner workings of the human body began centuries ago with the dissection of cadavers by doctors, surgeons and students, and the anatomical drawings of Da Vinci. Today, despite advances in biomedical research, our knowledge of the body continues to be revised. New discoveries about its capabilities and potential are made and published on a daily basis and represent one of science’s ‘final frontiers’. Take for instance a recent news report calling the human body “an untapped source of drugs” after it was found that our noses might hold a community of bacteria capable of producing the next generation of novel antibiotics.

Technologies and medicine like those developed in laboratories all over the world and at universities like Queen’s shape and question our relationships with our physical selves. The Welcome-Wolfson Institute for Experimental Medicine accommodates some 330 members of staff specialising in research into finding cures for eye disease and diabetes, and focuses on the development of a global programme to aid understanding of the genetics of complex chronic diseases. Despite working directly with some of these researchers, Killen’s approach seems less curious and more engaged with formal concerns.

Perhaps this marks a missed opportunity by Queen’s University to commission a speculative object that can destabilise established depictions of the body, and adequately represent a field of research that is constantly at the edge of innovation. Perhaps it is also a missed opportunity by the artist to go beyond representation and further engage with the type of new research and radical findings that the Welcome-Wolfson Institute for Experimental Medicine was designed to facilitate.

Ultimately, it is hard to pass judgement on works such as Capillarium. Located outdoors on the grounds of a publicly funded educational institution, it does not benefit from the type of context a white cube space can provide, nor is it strictly speaking ‘public art’. Though visitors to Queen’s University and members of the public – if they are aware of its existence, as it is not immediately visible from the street – can view the work, Capillarium’s intended audience is primarily made up of students and researchers. For them, this sculpture may connect to the research they are conducting. For some, however, Capillarium might too closely resemble the type of durable outdoor sculpture/public art found across Ireland and the UK to warrant a closer look.

The commissioning of a new work of (public) art is a rare and important thing that should happen more often. Crucially, it is also an opportunity to create something that, in the words of Bristol-based public art organisation Situations, doesn’t embellish but interrupt.

Alissa Kleist is a Belfast-based curator.

Image: Kevin Killen, Capillarium, 2016.

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RHONA BYRNE AND YVONNE McGUINNESS SPEAK ABOUT THEIR COLLABORATIVE PUBLIC ART COMMISSION ‘MOBILE MONUMENTS’.

Commissioned by Fingal County Council Arts office for their 1916 Commemorative Public Art Commission, ‘Mobile Monuments’ was produced as part of the 1916 Centenary Programme over a six-month period. The project involved three trikes with mobile sculptures, which turned into performance platforms becoming ‘forms in action’. The budget for the project was €35,000 and our proposal was selected through an open call submission with two rounds.

We have been friends for years but were living in different countries. Whenever we met we would eagerly hatch plans for future projects together. In 2015 we were finally living in the same place so decided to respond to the project call out to try and make our ideas a reality. The brief sought proposals that would “Remember, Reflect and Re-imagine” the events leading up to the 1916 Rising in Fingal. Both of our practices involve making, doing, collaboration, performance, participatory processes and public projects that are often catalysts to generate other narratives for participants. Our response to the brief was to try to develop a project that would look to the past but focus on future potential. Our project aims were to explore ideas around trust and collaboration, fast and slow networking, the passing of things and information between people and place, the materialisation of memory and myth, and the creation of social memory. We sought to make work that looked at covert communication and movement of objects, letters, objects etc. which had slowly travelled across the vast area of Fingal and connected different communities.

As our proposal fleshed out we focused on inviting both participants and members of the public to consider two key elements of the 1916 Rising time period: the slow movement of information (in contrast to the instant communication we now have) and the gathering of people around public platforms, ideas and manifestos that had the potential to change the social and political environment – remembering that the activities of the rising and their subsequent outcomes arose simply from ordinary people thinking about extraordinary things.

We had the continued support of Fingal County Council Arts Office Public Art Co-ordinator and Curator Caroline Cowley, who worked closely with us on the project. The 1916 commemorative committee supported connections to community groups and schools. Ideally, this kind of engagement requires an extended period of time to build and develop relationships, but this project happened in a six-month period and was broken up by three seasonal holidays. However, given that there were endless reflective and commemorative projects around 1916, people were aware of the context. This gave us good groundwork and allowed us to question how 1916 was being commemorated throughout our project. Keeping the time constraints in mind, we worked with a select number of groups that represented the different areas of the Fingal jurisdiction. The localities we chose to work in were very much on the outskirts of Fingal. Multiculturalism and the ‘new Irish’ became of real interest to us, as most of the kids we were working with were not of Irish descent. The students’ understanding of the events of 1916 was very nebulous in the sense that they had just been taught the facts.

We set about working with Swords Senior Citizens, Rush ICA, Swords Educate Together, St. Mary’s National School, Garristown, St. Catherine’s National School, Rush and Castaheany Educate Together. We delivered approximately 20 workshops with about 500 people. These included discussion, writing, performing and making. We wanted the schools and senior groups to collaborate and to form the project through the workshop process, developing the content through making props, working out text, devising performances and ultimately performing in them. Within the workshops we made a concerted effort to connect to the spirit of the rising and the language around it. Words like ‘freedom’, ‘future’, ‘radical’, ‘agitate’, ‘responsibility’, ‘power’ and ‘energy’ became the backbone of our workshops. We questioned how we could empower and mobilise people to consider the idea of activating social changes locally that could potentially have a wider impact.

In tandem with these workshops we were designing and fabricating the trike sculptures or Moving Monuments. We bought three trikes and stripped them down while we formed a team to help the monuments take shape and become mobile: steel fabricator Matt Fitzsimons (Fingal steel), bike mechanic Gary Sheehan, engineer Peter Brummer and Caroline Cowley all helped us negotiate the complexities of getting these sculptures on the road. How would they behave in bad weather conditions or on different road surfaces? What would they sound like? What load could they carry? And, most importantly for us, how could we make these unidentifiable objects? We started looking at post boxes and electricity boxes around the city. There are so many ‘forms with a function’ that exist in our built environment but that go unnoticed. Starting with small lumps of clay and scaling up through numerous variations of models and templates we constructed three shapes from aluminium. We wanted them to be light, quiet and to float through the landscape like secrets. The materials we worked with were transit blankets, event carpet, used for movement and gatherings, and satin often used in processions and ceremonies.

We had an endless to-do list that required strategic timetabling: fabricating the monuments, workshops with participants, devising performances, planning events and routes, and creating props. We noticed how well we were working together; somehow our skills matched and or complemented each other. We found ourselves switching roles mid task without even realising. It was a working relationship that was really put under pressure, and naturally there was the odd tense and difficult moment, but we always laughed about it later. Working collaboratively furthers the scope of how far you push an idea and helps with the decision making-process. Having a short and definite timeframe meant that we had to focus, while having Caroline Cowley as a third collaborator kept the process moving. We ended up creating a much more ambitious project than our initial proposal had aimed for, so this stretched our resources and finances to the max. Nonetheless we both seemed to thrive under the pressure and overall had so much fun working on this.

The project culminated over a three-week period when the bikes toured to different destinations around Fingal. We planned three large events that we saw as movements, weaving past, present and future together. The monuments floated like ghosts around the towns and housing estates of Fingal.

We invited Paddy Cahill, who filmed the journeys from his own bespoke bicycle built for filming. The cyclist Vincent Cronin, Michael McKenna, Harry, Charlie and Vincent from Balbriggan and Michael Carol from Skerries cycling initiatives moved the monuments with great stamina around the county. We had fixed assistive motors on the trikes to help with the many hills.

When the Mobile Monuments arrived to their destinations on three consecutive Fridays, they ceremoniously transformed into a platform for performance. Props made by the schools and senior groups were used for each movement. Soft blocks featuring language used around the 1916 Rising that we had developed during the workshops were sewn onto the blocks. These were assembled as monumental structures and placed in each location during the performances as a collective act by the participants, who chanted: “We weave our history. We weave our future”. The children carried the banners made by the senior citizens’ clubs and read their own visionary proclamations, which were both hopeful and moving. Each event concluded with a performance by rap band The Hash Tags from St. Catherine’s Primary School, who came on tour with us and performed at each event. They rapped about contemporary life and their vision for Ireland through a combination of spoken word, hip hop and Irish dancing. We both became performers in the movements in order to direct the timing of the events as we had little rehearsal time. Our costumes were intentionally surreal, as if we had come from an imagined future to invite the audience to re-imagine theirs. We hope that in people’s imaginations the Mobile Monuments are still travelling around the world arriving at various destinations, providing a platform for people to gather and give voice to an undiscovered future. Hopefully they are inspiring and mobilising people to change their social and political environment.

Images: Rhona Byrne and Yvonne McGuinness, Mobile Monuments and Moving Monuments; photos by Brian Cregan

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The closing event for ‘Eva 2016: Still (the) Barbarians’ was the culmination of one the most well received Eva exhibitions in recent years. Reflecting the scope and complexity of the biennial itself, the presentations and discussions were diverse and ambitious, representing a range of both Irish and international offerings on postcolonial discourse. Curator Koyo Kouoh began by introducing Alan Phelan’s “counterfactual” film Our Kind (2016), which imagines a future for Roger Casement had he not been executed in 1916.

Post-Colony: Curatorial Perspectives from India and South America

Chair Declan Long (MA Art in the Contemporary World, NCAD)  reiterated Casement’s relevance to discussions on colonialism and postcolonialism in Ireland. His work in the Congo, Long stated, highlighted the abuses of colonialism and ties in to contemporary representations of exploitation, such as Jeremy Hutchinson’s work for Eva on indigo production.

Grant Watson (Curatorial Theory, Royal College of Art, London) has spent over 15 years researching and curating contemporary Indian art. Watson spoke mostly about the role of poet and artist Rabindranath Tagore’s art school Kala Bhavana, established in 1940, during the Indian decolonisation movement. In creating a syllabus for the school, Tagore and the artist Nandalal Bose wanted to bypass British influence, looking to the far reaches of Asia, as well as Europe, to create a cosmopolitan knowledge base for students. They travelled widely, including several times to Japan, bringing back books and ideas.

Watson noted Kala Bhavana’s connection to Bauhaus, which was established in the same year, and also emphasised the workshop and the social function of art. In both institutions the language of modernism was used to depict social upheaval, exploring ideas of colonialism.

Watson then spoke about his own curatorial practice, specifically his work with Sheela Gowda, whose large scale installations explore the problems inherent in the language of modernism as well as exploitation in modern India.

Independent curator and writer Catalina Lozano introduced her research and curatorial practice on forms of colonialism across Latin America. Her interest lies in historiography as a way to counter historical hegemonies. She introduced the theorist Anibal Quijano’s ‘coloniality of power’, which describes the continuation of colonial hierarchies and paradigms in postcolonial societies.

Lozano discussed several Latin American artists, beginning with Fernando Palma Rodriguez, whose works relate to his heritage in the indigenous central regions of Mexico. Palma Rodriguez explores the loss of minority languages and in turn of “particular and specific ways of understanding the world”.

Next, Lozano introduced Carolina Caycedo, whose work incorporates direct activism opposing the construction of multiple dams in Colombia, which has led to displacement of indigenous people and exploitation of natural resources. Continuing the theme of environmental concerns and of political protest, Lozano moved on to Eduardo Abaroa, whose work The Total Destruction of the National Museum of Anthropology (2013) imagines razing the Mexico City institution. The piece highlights inequality in how we regard artefacts, people and the natural world.

During the panel discussion, Kouoh reiterated the idea of colonial constructs, arguing that discriminatory racial hierarchies, in particular, are an “invention of Europe”. For Lozano, this is an example of “internalised colonialism”, perpetuated by our continuing Eurocentrism.

Kouoh brought up assimilation and perpetrators becoming ‘local’, bringing the discussion towards Ireland. Lozano cited the mass extermination of indigenous people in Argentina, which occurred after the country’s independence, as an example of how indigenous movements are often in opposition to the mainstream anti-colonial agenda.

The discussion moved to the role of contemporary political and economic systems in continuing colonial structures. The ideology of neoliberalism, which sees capitalism as inevitable, Lozano argued, continues to posit indigenous people as “behind” in the model of social development. This was also explored by Tagore, Watson stated, in his attempts to create a different modernism not intrinsically tied to European industrial capitalism. In this system indigenous people are often “trapped by the idea of authenticity”, which defines them as worthy of protection but can also force them to remain stuck in a particular time.

Artists and Post-Colonial Legacy

Following a performance of Media Minerals by David Blandy and Larry Achiampong, artist Yong Sun Gullach spoke about her performance work on transnational adoption. Born in Korea, Gullach was adopted to Denmark. She sees transnational adoption as a continuing visible trace of colonialism and began by posing a series of questions challenging our preconceived notions: “Why do so many women have to give up their children? Why is this practice largely funded by receiver countries? Where are the parents in this process?”

In a particularly powerful description she referred to the process of transnational adoption as one of “exploiting resources” in a colonised country that contravenes the UN Declaration on the Rights of the Child by denying the child knowledge of their indigenous identity and their original family. The common practice of forging birth documents to comply with international rules further entrenches this. In the process of transnational adoption, whiteness is “borne upon” the child. A key part of colonialism, she argued, is that the norms of indigenous people in colonised countries become disorientated and are forced into Western paradigms, echoing Lozano’s sentiment about internalised colonialism.

Gullach emphasised the political potential of performance. Bodies possess the power to “define new linear norms” through processes of disorientation. She sees this as a challenge to postcolonial power that has not proved a popular position to assert within the art world.

Mary Evans spoke about her work and her life, which, like Galluch, are closely intertwined. Born in Nigeria, Evans moved to London in the late 1960s aged six and is interested in issues of migration, psychogeography and race. She began with an anecdote about her first experience of institutional racism after being relatively sheltered growing up in a community of immigrants.

Evans spoke about her use of decorative arts as a foil for the content of the work. Ordinary brown paper is a recurring motif, demonstrated in Held (2013), displayed at Limerick City Gallery, which depicts refugees waiting in an endless line. Evans often uses materials from her childhood growing up among immigrants from former colonies, representing their attempts to absorb and mimic British culture.

Lastly, Evans introduced a residency she undertook at the Edinburgh Botanic Gardens, looking at how the movement of tropical flora and fauna mirrored the movement of people from former colonies to Britain and the botanic garden as a manifestation of Victorian imperial Britain.

In the discussion, Kouoh noted the common theme of ‘othering’ across the artists’ works. She questioned Achiampong and Blandy about the element of their work that encourages those around them to relive past events. Achiampong described how his own family never discussed coming to Britain as paperless migrants. Evans spoke of the common experience of Irish and West Indian immigrants in London, while Achiampong and Blandy emphasised the ways in which both similarity and difference of experience had brought them together. Achiampong talked of the shame felt by all migrants to a new country, his own childhood desire to be white and feeling different from his parents. This led back to Gullach’s thesis about the experience of transnational adoptees, whose history has been “whitewashed”. She became frustrated with official channels and activism, where she was often silenced for being “too emotional”. Mary Evans concurred, describing how art helps her to understand a history of which she has no direct memory but which affects her daily life.

Asked about their connection to Ireland, Achiampong, Blandy and Evans all referred to their direct experience growing up in Kilburn, London, among a large Irish community. Gullach made comparisons to the Faroe Islands, former colonies of Denmark that have internalised Danish language and culture to an “irreversible extent”. She noted the different trajectories of ‘white’ colonies, when oppressor and oppressed cannot be distinguished by race.

Architecture and Memory

Dr John Logan (History, UL) spoke about the changing urban shape of Limerick City. He began by showing a map from 1633, when the city was divided in Englishtown and Irishtown, moving to the changes of the eighteenth century when Edward Sexton Perry owned most of the land that now makes up the city centre. This sudden move from the theoretical to the physical demonstrated the tangible legacy of colonial rule on the urban Irish landscape.

The consistency of the British colonial project was evidenced in the familial connections between landowners and administrators in Ireland and India. Plassey House, for example, now part of the university campus, was named after a British victory in India in which thousands were slaughtered. It was known by this name for many years with little thought to its origin.

He described the “funnel of deprivation” that formed through the city after independence, as the rich moved to the outskirts,  Englishtown and Irishtown dissolving only in name. This was the case across many Irish towns and demonstrates the reality of continuing inequality.  Logan spoke about the concept of “fabricated histories”, exemplified by the reclaiming of the old Englishtown and its cobbled streets for tourism. ‘Education’ is used as a defense for prioritising these areas over those in which people actually live.

Dr Aislinn O’Donnell (Philosophy, UL) spoke about “navigating colonial remains” through philosophy. She returned to Lozano’s concept of internalised colonial structures, noting how the past “speaks through us” in our language, for example in the myriad ways people describe Northern Ireland: the six counties, the north of Ireland or Ulster. In this way our implicit allegiances are given away.

Referencing the philosopher Enrique Dussel, she queried Ireland’s position within the paradigms of colonial and postcolonial analysis. “Who are the Irish? Where is Ireland? Is it located at the centre or the periphery?” Ireland is positioned as a “different kind” of colony, largely due to its white population. European philosophy sees itself as universal, which is an important part of Cavafy’s poem after which Eva 2016 was named. What might a ‘barbarian’ philosophy be like?

She spoke of the “underside” of modernity: the genocides that were not “anomalies of history” but a central part of the ‘modern’ world created through colonialism. This conquering ego still decides “who gets to speak”. O’Donnell returned to Northern Ireland, and our reluctance to speak about it due to a “volatile mixture” of political shame and willed ignorance. The situation reveals a collective responsibility that has not been met.

O’Donnell emphasised her frustration in trying to talk about colonialism, which is viewed as unfashionable or embarrassing. Primo Levi’s notion of the shame of being human describes our refusal to see the suffering in which we are complicit. As both participants in and subjects of colonial structures we are unwilling to admit our own othering impulses.

The panel discussion, chaired by Caoimhín Mac Giolla Léith, turned quickly towards the direct provision system in Ireland and the “uncomfortable otherness” on our doorstep, which has taken the place of the Magdalene Laundries. O’Donnell concurred, referring to Homi Bhaba’s writings. What we mean when we say we’re opposed to colonialism, she argued, is in fact very complicated in the Irish context. We are not living in a post colonial or a post racist society. Some lives are valued more than others.

Professor Luke Gibbons (Irish Literary and Cultural Studies, NUI Maynooth) introduced his closing remarks with a quote from Finnegan’s Wake about the English being full stoppers and the Irish  semi colonials, and spoke about the “choreography of coincidences” that are created through art. Gibbons noted the connection between Tagore’s school and Pádraig Pearse’s school in their attempts to transcend colonial educational paradigms. He also mentioned Tagore’s play The Post Office, said to have inspired the Rising in its depiction of the GPO as the symbol of colonial rule. Continuing the word play, he stated a need to rescue the word ‘post’ from its temporal meaning.

Returning to the idea of invented tradition, he argued that seeing these histories as invented is a misconception. The past is not fixed. In the revolution the avant garde’s role is to imagine the future, which the present must then catch up with. The Rising, for example, had no popular mandate at the time and was seen by many as elitist. Its mandate has come from the future, which partly explains the state’s continuing discomfort. For Gibbons, memory is made and remade, not passed on. Commemoration is itself part of the 1916 Rising, which was not one event but is a continuous history that changes with memory.

Gibbons closed on the idea of colonial universalism, which counters reality, where everything is grounded in the specific. We view art through our own contextual eyes. He referenced Mary Evans’s point that the spaces between us are in fact what bring us together. Differences are simply more interesting. Art and aesthetic appreciation are necessary for filling in the gaps between the ethical and the political.

Lily Power, Production Editor, Visual Artists Ireland

Images: Yong Sun Gullach performing at Eva; Koyo Kouoh and Larry Achiampong, Belltable, Limerick; photos by Deirdre Power

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David Fagan, Tactic, Cork, 23 June – 20 July 2016

Sometimes I find it interesting, on my first encounter with an exhibition, to pretend I am illiterate.

A brightly lit, concrete-floored rectangle. A white sentence on a red floating partition. Three separate clusters of green glass beer bottles. On one wall, a black and white photograph of four suited and bespectacled persons unknown; on the opposite, a colour photograph of two men in a pub, one to the rear, one to the fore. A pedestal upon which a ticket and ticket receipt are propped, another sentence in the crook of the wall, this time in red. A video, one moment showing a solitary trolley outside a squat, brick building against a blue sky, the next showing the same scene on a TV screen inside a living room – net curtain, radiator, fireplace – and a tune burbling up from inside the video, a soul song from the 1970s. As the screen blacks out it throws its chorus to a speaker in the ceiling: “Have you seen her? Tell me have you seen her?”

At this point, illiterate-me leaves the premises, almost standing on a smart phone which someone appears to have left charging beside the entrance as she goes.

Tactic is the exhibition space encircled by Sample Studios, programmed by an in-house curator and two curators-in-residence, joint recipients of the organisation’s 2015 Curatorial Graduate Residency Award, one of whom, Aoife Power, is responsible for the Fagan show, as well as its accompanying literature, for which I was considerably grateful.

After several minutes of reading, I understand that the show’s surface ambiguity arises from its being a body of work-in-progress, which began when Fagan returned to live in Tallaght – where he is from – as an attempt to look afresh, to summon enthusiasm, for this place possibly most remarkable for everybody’s apparent lack of enthusiasm for it. And lo, surely out of age-old habit, Fagan has steered away from Tallaght, turning instead to the German town Kreis Segeberg, with which, in 1997, it was twinned. The black and white photograph shows the twinning ceremony; the caption names three men and designates the only woman as ‘unnamed’. The nameless woman has something to do with the solitary trolley video, partially explaining the inclusion of the Chi-Lites 1971 hit single Have You Seen Her? The ticket is for the 2016 Karl May Festival hosted by Kreis Segeberg, and Karl May is one of the best-selling German writers of all time, renowned for his adventure stories of the American West, as well as for never having travelled any further than New York.

“If things look completely the same, I search for differences,” John Baldessari said in conversation with Thomas McEvilley in 1999; “if completely different, I search for similarities”. Like that of Baldessari, Fagan’s work is droll. The colour photograph turns out to be a Becks ad; the man to the rear is the artist himself. He smirks out from the pub across the exhibition space, and the nameless woman smirks back, as they share some joke without a  punchline.

And the battered Samsung on the floor by the entrance – screen shattered in a spidery pattern, rainbow sticker on the back – is an artwork. OMG maybe you saw me like ten minutes ago was first included in Fagan’s solo exhibition at Siamsa Tíre last year. The jerkily moving scene is a public square: trees, buildings, a scattered crowd. This is the view from a webcam somewhere in Berlin and the soundtrack is the artist phoning his friend, who is somewhere in the square, somewhere in Berlin, cognisant of the coming call. The most potentially interesting part of the conversation takes place at the very beginning, as he struggles to locate her in the webcam’s frame: “…where are you…I’m walking around the circle…I’m on the wrong side…am I holding my left arm out…?” The Chi-Lites sing out their chorus, indicating why this particular piece has been reused, but almost as soon as Fagan has seen her, the poetry dissipates. The artist stumbles to explain what he is trying to do by making the piece; stumbles to establish a connection with his faraway friend.

Had the wall held 20 shattered and stickered Samsungs, 20 friends on 20 webcams in 20 different cities, the artist floundering to identify each, this would have been a brilliant artwork. But instead it’s just a snapshot, like every other piece here.

As a body of work, ‘I Have Nada So Far But I Remain Optimistic’ is frustrating. As an exercise in curation, perhaps it does something more interesting: taking a spool of ideas and exposing it to the light before it is fully developed; perhaps propounding that there’s no reason why in-progress work can’t be presented for exhibition. The title, after all, confesses its flaws: Fagan has nada so far, but seemingly remains optimistic that the show will be evaluated in a similar spirit of optimism.

Sara Baume is a writer based in West Cork.

Images: David Fagan, ‘I Have Nada So Far But I Remain Optimistic’, Tactic, Cork

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Farmleigh Gallery, Dublin, 10 June – 7 August

‘Two Birds/One Stone’ is an absorbing exploration of materiality. Janet Mullarney has chosen works by a wide range of artists from the last two decades which explore the complexity, tactility and associative power of materials. The exhibition features work by Cecily Brennan, Dorothy Cross, Maud Cotter, Aleana Egan, John Gibbons, Tony Hill, Mary Kelly, Alice Maher, Eileen McDonagh, Locky Morris, Paul Mosse, Helen O’Leary, Niamh O’Malley, Adrian Paci, Rachel Parry, Alan Phelan, Kathy Prendegast, Linda Quinlan, David Quinn, Eddie Rafferty, Charles Tyrrell, Michael Warren and Daphne Wright.

The layout is carefully orchestrated, Mullarney states in her introduction to the exhibition, to guide the viewer through this central premise “that the material chosen is imperative to the final reading of the work”. She continues: “The simplicity and directness of choice means there is no need of further explanation, one can understand through the eyes just how the artist has imparted everything that needs to be said through the use and choice of material”.

You first enter a compact room with two small contemplative works: a small, delicate piece in resin by Paul Mosse and Charles Tyrrell’s found boulder with the word “Here” carved into to it. The next room is a parade of sculptural ideas and making strategies, presented in a way that utilises the long narrow shape of the gallery. The effect is akin to a cast court, where objects created at different times and in different places find common cause and come together to create something new while still retaining their individual resonance.

The wall of the main area of the gallery is painted gold. Metallic walls have been in vogue since Warhol’s factory, but rather than allude to the future it seems that the metallic colour here relates to the past, more Duccio than Billy Name. The gold speaks of preciousness, and of things being alchemically altered by the sculptor’s intervention. The idea that objects, albeit sometimes those made from very unpromising materials, can be imbued with life and poetry by the sculptor’s intervention seems fundamental to the exhibition.

‘Two Birds/One Stone’ is a paean to the physical act of making – to reduction, addition, manipulation and adaptation. The use of found elements, often situated alongside more conventional art materials, is a theme that runs through the show. The interventions in the found range from the ostensibly straightforward, such as Michael Warren’s chopped and charred piece of oak, Trefoil (2013),  to the complex and laborious, such as the fragile interlocking structures created by Helen O’Leary to support The Shelf Life of Facts (2015).

Manipulating the powerful associations of found materials is a theme that runs through many of the works in the show. Rachel Parry’s Water Gloves – clothes for transformation, exquisitely rendered fish skin gloves with webbed fingers, and Alice Maher’s Medea’s Gloves (1998), silk gloves adorned with flowing tassels of human hair, seem to allude to ideas of enchantment or magical transformation.

Kathy Prendergast’s Grave Blanket (1997), a woollen blanket combined with marble chippings, and Dorothy Cross’s Bedding (1993), which comprises a cow udder, a pillow and blankets, are works that use the symbolic power and cultural associations of found materials to provoke a sense of unease. They both use materials associated with comfort and put them with objects which are discomforting in a way that invites the viewer to meditate on corporeality.

Interestingly it is a video work that most clearly asserts the show’s central theme. Adrian Paci’s The Column (2013) features a block of marble being prepared at a quarry in China and then transported to Europe. En route it is carved into a Corinthian column. We watch in awe as a team of masons form the stone. The skill with which they approach their work and their knowledge of the physical characteristics of the material is mesmerising. The work resonates with several others in the exhibition, evoking images of other artists and their relationships with materials, about ancient processes such as stone carving, and more recent processes such as welding or assemblage. The video made me notice the way that sculptures as diverse in style as those by David Quinn, Helen O’Leary and John Gibbons all bore notches, indentations and marks, also indicating the process of creation.

The show’s emphasis on deliberate, meticulous and intensive process does not mean that it’s devoid of humour. For instance Linda Quinlan’s subversive work, It Adds to the Confusion (2006), a conflation of the sort of objects that would have been very at home in a post-war suburban living room, has none of the organic textures of other works in the show, but it shares the seriousness of purpose Mullarney alludes to in her curatorial choices and in her foreword to the catalogue. This catalogue by Jurga Rakauskaite is worthy of mention. It is a small but meticulously designed hardback book with an exposed spine and a blind embossed gold stone shape on the cover. Created in the manner of an artist’s book in an edition of 500, it reflects Mullarney’s curatorial premise of a profound engagement with materials and making.

Andy Parsons is an artist and curator based in Sligo. He is the co-founder of Floating World Artists’ Books.

andyparsonsartist.com, floatingworldbooks.com

Image: ‘Two Birds/One Stone’ installation view, Farmleigh Gallery

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John Byrne, The LAB, Dublin, 24 June – 10 August 2016

The official 1916 commemoration on Easter Sunday was a conservative if dignified solution that marked the de facto centenary of the foundation of our state. Designed to avoid controversy or soul searching, the event sidelined years of colossal social and economic upheaval in favour of a traditional military parade by the Irish Defence Forces. And they did it very well.  In contrast, but arguably hidden safely in the margins, John Byrne’s exhibition ‘Would You Die for Ireland?’ is part of the LAB Gallery’s series of exhibitions supported by Dublin City Council’s Commemoration Fund, which asked artists “to consider what contribution we might make to future readings of the Easter Rising”.

Byrne considers the perspective of his childhood self, following in the tradition of Patrick Kavanagh and Michael Hartnett, whose poetry glimpsed the ordinary things of childhood that grow in significance later in life. In particular, Byrne’s works An Ghaeltacht 1972 and Easter 1968 bring to mind poems like Hartnett’s Death of an Irish Woman or Kavanagh’s My Father Played the Melodian. Easter 1968 captures Byrne’s memory of a family trip from his home in Belfast to Dublin where they examined the bullet holes in the columns of the GPO. The work comprises a large colour photograph of a staged version of this event using models dressed in their Sunday best (immaculate period dress): a dreamlike cinematic family portrait printed in shimmering technicolour. A blue mackerel sky and bright sunshine bathe the shot, which was taken from a low angle looking upwards, allowing the GPO to soar dramatically behind the group as their father relates the events of the Rising. The mise en scene creates an arresting image that records an important memory. A text accompanies this work and others, in which Byrne’s narrative voice drifts between his childhood and grown-up self offering honesty and continued bewilderment at the uncontrollable events that unfolded after that day in 1968.   

In two works Byrne reflects more directly on the legacy of 1916 and of partition by recounting the cultural schism of daily life under the first Stormont parliamentary system. With boyish humour, An Ghaeltacht 1972 and Peep deal with the predicament of being Catholic in a Protestant state, which he likens to the experience of closeted sexuality. Peep refers directly to the ban on the public display of the tricolour and the thrill of seeing it at GAA matches. He creates a private viewing kiosk where a video of the tricolour flying vigorously to a rousing orchestral arrangement of Amhrann na bFhiann can be observed. As absurd and hilarious that Peep is it’s difficult not to relish Byrne’s ridicule of daft legislation while enjoying a clandestine moment of patriotism.

An Ghaeltacht 1972, like Easter 1968, is a staged photograph of the young Byrne larking around in a sweeping Donegal landscape while freely brandishing a bouquet of shoplifted tricolours. The text that goes with this image is comically self-deprecating but implicit in the telling is Byrne’s genuine childhood need for cultural refuge in the curative environment of the Donegal countryside. 

You get the sense that Byrne’s geographic and cultural dislocation continues to define his identity through the sense of absence and uncertainty that prompts him to investigate the experiences of others. Byrne made a vox pop video in 2003 (with a postscript from 2016) in which he takes to the streets of Belfast, Dublin and Cork asking members of the public “Would you die for Ireland?” Byrne’s utterly neutral tone and refusal to manipulate his subjects gives a wistful gravitas to the absurdity of the endeavour. While he has earnestly recorded and edited the responses into an accomplished artwork, one can’t help feeling it was doomed to fail from the outset. But more than any other work it succeeds by pointing to the potentially destructive impact of extremist identities in any context and, sadly, to a contemporary fatigue in ‘defining Ireland’. Encouragingly though, many of the negative responses are rhetorical as he prompts subjects to wonder: If not Ireland, who would I die for? Byrne’s impartial approach emphasises a need for open questions that give voice to uncertainty, desire, hope and introspection untangled from historical polemic.

The entire exhibition, ‘Would You Die for Ireland?’, provides a rich seam of material through which to consider any future reading of the Easter Rising. It offers candid witness testimony to the legacy of 1916 through Byrne’s ingenuous poetic texts, beautifully crafted visuals and modest sense of humour.

Carissa Farrell is a curator based in Dublin.

Images: John Byrne, Peep and Easter 1968

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