MICHAËLE CUTAYA INTERVIEWS DANIEL JEWESBURY, CURATOR OF TULCA FESTIVAL OF VISUAL ARTS 2016 (5 – 20 NOVEMBER 2016).

Michaële Cutaya: You are the curator of this year’s TULCA and your theme is ‘The Headless City’. The city is a central concern in your work as a writer, curator and filmmaker. Previous projects such as ‘Re-Public’ (Dublin, 2010) and ‘The Headless City’ (Berlin, 2014) explored our relationship with the city and its spaces. Can you describe how this inquiry will manifest in Galway this month?

Daniel Jewesbury: What is interesting for me about the city of the industrial era (Galway has never been an industrial city but it was part of the industrial era) and what is the starting point for this TULCA, is how we historically moved to the city to escape certain types of social and economic ties that were very much linked to place. We exchanged bonds of obligation, religion and family for other types of bonds. There was this idea that in the city you got a certain type of freedom as a worker in exchange for selling labour. This process underpins the birth of socialism and social democracy, movements based on class affiliation and class interest rather than rootedness, family, clans and so on.

With the development of the neoliberal city in the last 30 years – the city as financial instrument, as one large complex derivative – that contract between the individual labourer and the city has been eroded. The social democratic city as it existed has been broken. I don’t know that neoliberalism really represents a new stage in the city’s periodisation. I think it’s a stage of transition and we don’t know where we are going.

MC: You wrote that the concept of ‘The Headless City’ was inspired by both Georges Bataille’s writings on architecture and the utopian urbanist Bruno Taut. Bataille considered that headlessness (in reference to the decapitation of the tyrant) was a precondition of the modern city, whereas Taut argued for the need for a city crown, such as the cathedrals, or the Acropolis, to bind us together communally, preventing the modern city from losing its way.

DJ: The tension here is that I’m not trying to prescribe a response. I can see a problem – the problem I’ve already outlined – but what interests me is that there are so many different ways to approach this. There are dark futurisms that see human existence being fundamentally challenged by the development of urban society, yet there are more regressive responses based on the idea that the city itself is the problem.

I see Taut’s socialist idealism, his longing for a completely planned city, as a wistful nostalgia for the order of pre-capitalist societies, but it’s essentially backward-looking. Bataille is incredibly interesting, because across so many of his philosophical concepts – including the theory of expenditure, which highlights capitalism’s inability to conceptualise unproductive time or waste, and his notions of sovereignty, base materialism, heterology and so on – he asserts that what we most urgently need to do is dispel our desire for the city to function as a perfect system, because perfect systems are the problem here. In the midst of the most stark and basic social inequality, we get distressed about how badly the system is run. In fact, it’s only thanks to the system being so badly run that we manage to survive at all.

Bataille reintroduces all the things that we try to repress in the modern, clean, ‘smart’ city: dirt, death, blood, pain, loss. This isn’t just a valorisation of the low and the base and the mean; it’s a simple statement that these things aren’t going away. They are what our city is built on, and we have to be able to embrace this difference in trying to get ourselves out of this mess. There may be some things that we have to re-appraise, some approaches to the city that we’ve forgotten, but we have to look toward rethinking ourselves too, so there is a Janus-like activity here, with ‘Headlessness’ evoking a beautiful tension. In decapitating and removing the sovereign, we must not simply replace him or occupy his position, echoing the cold, calculating rationality of capitalism; rather we must try to find new sensibilities – a task that is essentially also headless.

MC: There has been rising concern over the privatisation of public urban spaces with the spread of Privately Owned Public Spaces (POPS), blurring the differences between the two, and our perception of which is which.

DJ: In her book Ground Control, Anna Minton cautions against fetishising public space or seeing it as always inherently more free; rather, we need to consider which aspects of the public control of space we want to protect and preserve, and how it is qualitatively different from privately-managed space. It is important to challenge the idea that public space is something that exists as a common good. In all my projects, I want to eliminate static notions of the public as a space that’s ‘outside’ and can be ‘entered’. Much more dynamic concepts of the public are possible.

I have been writing recently about triadic definitions of the public. There is the ‘public sphere’ in the bourgeois sense, the ‘public sector’ – infrastructures managed by the state, which in turn derive legitimacy from the public – and ‘public space’, which is perhaps the most nebulous of all. There is no public space unless we create it together. We only create it through some actual manifestation of being ‘in common’. It’s not there waiting for us to occupy or inhabit. These interconnecting ideas destabilise one another, creating a lot of tension, but suggest ways of shedding static notions of the public as an unproblematic ‘good’ in opposition to privately owned things. The private is not simply bad while the public is simply good. We need to have a much more unstable understanding of what the public is.

MC: Galway is often discussed as a ‘festival city’, and TULCA is itself a long-running visual arts festival. What possibilities does the format offer for destabilisations?

DJ: As well as artworks in the main venues, there will be a range of live works and performances around the city, as well as interventionist pieces and some offsite works. Each weekend a number of events are planned, because I wanted to create situations and opportunities for reflection in common, rather than the focus being on individual reflection in the tradition of the connoisseur going around the galleries. Such activities will bring audiences out into the city, forcing us to assess our relationship with the city, while prompting us to question what might be an appropriate use of public space or how we are expected to behave.

Our festival venue this year is Fairgreen, a pristine concrete retail space that’s never been used for its intended purpose, where we’ll be showing work by five artists, including Liam Crichton and Paddy Jolley (1964 – 2012). I’m excited about it because it’s the site of Galway’s former abattoirs. The last slaughterhouse in the city was there until about 15 or 20 years ago. So here we have the cool rectilinear space of commerce, unused, taken over as the site of art, and standing on the blood of all the animals that were slaughtered there for 40 years. Paddy Jolley’s work will also be showing in Galway Arts Centre, a film of his that I understand hasn’t been exhibited in Ireland before.

There’s a huge amount of new work too, from commissioned artists and the open call. An artwork by Ian Hamilton Finlay (1925 – 2006) will be presented by one of his collaborators, the artist Leslie Edge, who will recreate one of Finlay’s wall texts in Galway Arts Centre. This is very exciting for me personally, as he’s probably the artist who’s had the most influence on me, and I wrote to him years ago, before I even went to art college. There are two pieces being produced for Galway University Hospital (GHU), including a permanent commission by Miranda Blennerhassett, as well as a site-specific work outside the old Nurses’ Home by Jane Butler. I really want people to come down for the opening weekend, as we have a huge amount on: a performance by James Moran in the Mechanics’ Institute, a performance around the city by Glasgow duo Two Ruins and a screening of an amazing, disturbing film called Aaaaaaaah! by London filmmaker Steve Oram, which stars Toyah Wilcox and Noel Fielding. It’s kind of like Themroc done by Vic Reeves on acid.

Michaële Cutaya is a writer on art living in County Galway. She co-founded Fugitive Papers and is currently co-editor of CIRCA online.

Daniel Jewesbury is an artist, researcher, writer, editor and freelance curator based in Belfast. He also lectures in Film Studies at the University of Ulster.

Images: Patrick Jolley, Kola Region, 2009 – 2011, digital black and white archival pigment print mounted on diabond; Daniel Jewesbury, The Headless City performance event at Bruno Taut’s housing complex, Berlin, 2014.

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2016 has been a momentous year. What might the Reeling in the Years montage of 2016 look like? Which prevailing narratives will be retrieved from archives in years to come? In a year defined by global terror and the migrant crisis, Europe’s borders – once softened under free trade agreements – suddenly seemed to stand to attention. Amidst the uncertainties of Brexit, we watched imperial nationalism shrivel in front of our eyes, fold inwards and splinter. Meanwhile, at the periphery of Fortress Europe, Ireland marked the centenary of the 1916 Easter Rising, a pivotal moment in the founding of a fully independent Irish Republic.

Despite reservations that remembering histories shared with Northern Ireland might prove contentious, or that audiences nationwide might become jaded by seemingly endless renditions of pageantry and memorials, the commemorations so far have largely been well received. As outlined by Helen Carey in her column, the visual arts have taken centre-stage in marking the ongoing decade of centenaries (2012 – 2022). With one eye on future archival trajectories, this issue considers a number of artists’ projects that mediated important ground on modern day notions of equality, resistance and citizenship.

The 1916 centenary saw additional funding being allocated towards a range of international projects, some of which are profiled in this issue by Andrew Duggan, James, L. Hayes and Caoimhghin Ó Fráithile. In addition, a number of major state-funded commissions, such as ‘In the Shadow of the State’ and ‘Stormy Petrel/ Guairdeal’, have comprised performance-driven or event-based spectacles, suitably emphasising physical and temporal experiences over permanent structures. Importantly, projects of this nature have served to reaffirm the vital role of narrative and ‘witness-writing’ in documenting and preserving these ephemeral live encounters.

A burgeoning awareness of the importance of archives has also emerged as a defining feature of these commemorative landscapes, heavily informed by oral histories, material objects and other primary sources. It therefore seems incongruous, in this year of national reflection, that ‘heritage’ should have to fight for representation in cabinet portfolios, that museums should be so chronically underfunded or that libraries around the country should be closing – a situation akin to the state eating itself, one word at a time.

A number of key developments this year have been punctuated and infused with an awareness of the past, as if some time-shrinking device had been unleashed, heightening our relationship with the historic and drawing it ever closer. Just as commemorations of the 1913 Dublin Lockout brought the disenfranchised workers of last century into conversations about modern labour practices, so the martyred rebels of the Rising seemed to cast a watchful eye over proceedings.

‘Beware of the Risen People’ – taken from Patrick Pearse’s poem The Rebel – offered a galvanising slogan for last year’s countrywide anti-water charge protests. ‘Was it for this?’ has also frequently been used, both as a rallying cry and a benchmark to assess contentious developments, from Olympic tickets and Apple taxes, to NAMA dealings and vulture funds, as though Yeats’s critique of the self-serving politics of 1913 could not be more relevant for modern Ireland.

The proximity of history was nowhere more poignantly felt than in national synchronised readings of the 1916 Proclamation – an iconic and visionary manifesto for sovereignty and equality. Addressing the suffrage and allegiance of “every Irish man and Irish woman”, it is easy to overlook how radical the Proclamation actually was. Against a backdrop of the Republic’s abysmal history regarding the treatment of women, a wave of women’s campaigns and feminist projects have galvanised this year, building on the momentum generated by 2015’s Waking the Feminists, as discussed by Aislinn O’Donnell in her column. Under the unifying theme ‘Rise and Repeal’, tens of thousands took part in the fifth annual march for choice in September, providing commentary on the “failure of the Republic to fulfil the promise of equality made in 1916”.

For the complacent, developments this year felt like a full-blown feminist ambush; however for those who have campaigned invisibly for decades, they felt like hard-won validations of their efforts. The contribution of artists’ activism in augmenting wider mainstream resistance by generating dialogue and visual awareness (from murals and posters, to banners and badges) is a subject that warrants further scrutiny.

This issue also features a column by Jo Mangan, chair of the National Campaign for the Arts (NCFA), which outlines the NCFA’s activities this year, as they continue their important lobbying work, articulating the vital role of the arts in contemporary Irish society. In response to Budget 2016, the NCFA stated that in a year when the arts sector was being congratulated for its pivotal contributions to the national commemorations programme, there was “insufficient conviction within government” to maintain levels of investment that would reflect Ireland’s “world-class creative sector” and value it as the country’s “most obvious natural resource”.

Joanne Laws is a writer and researcher based in Roscommon.

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­­­­JOANNE LAWS INTERVIEWS SARAH BROWNE AND JESSE JONES ABOUT THEIR ONGOING PROJECT ‘IN THE SHADOW OF THE STATE’.

Joanne Laws: Perhaps you might explain how your collaboration came about and introduce some of your initial ideas in developing this major new project?

Sarah Browne/Jesse Jones: We’d known each other’s practices for many years and felt that at some stage we would find the right opportunity to work together. In 2014, we started discussing a potential collaboration with Patrick Fox (then Director of Create), and later Rachel Anderson (then producer/curator at Artangel, London). We attempted to identify the greatest urgencies for us as artists at that time and felt there was a renewed need to examine and refigure the position of women in relation to a patriarchal nation state. From the beginning of our work together, law and its instruments have been a critical focus. The Irish Sea also loomed large in our imagination.

Our initial collaborative proposal centred on adapting Máiréad Ni Ghráda’s Irish language play An Triail into a courtroom drama that would tour Ireland with a community cast. A proposed series of outside broadcasts would take the form of an interactive ‘feminist chat show’. That proposal was unsuccessful, but subsequent discussions with Artangel ultimately led to a co-commissioning partnership with Create to produce a major new project which was formalised in 2014.

In keeping with Artangel’s working method, we carried out one year of research, followed by an evaluation, and one year of production. This intense period of research in relative privacy allowed us to develop our methodology and to plan upcoming activities. The project began as an enquiry into how women’s bodies have historically been symbols of political hope and freedom, yet were materially forced to endure painful injustices by the state. Drawing on post-colonial and counter-revolutionary narratives, we felt that the Irish experience in particular is well-placed to critique modern concepts of statehood and capital. We were excited to consider this feminist inquiry through a transnational project residing in dual legal jurisdictions, and believed it was important to produce research that would not only illustrate the past, but offer logic to decode contemporary realities.

JL: Can you outline the project’s various phases?

SB/JJ: During our first year of research, we followed our instincts through a succession of interviews, archive visits, meetings and field trips to sites such as: the Blasket Islands, the Dublin to Liverpool ferry, feminist and women’s libraries, and the Royal College of Gynaecology and Obstetrics Museum in London. We also visited courtrooms, sat in on the symphysiotomy trials and began engaging with the Northern/Irish Feminist Judgments Project. [1] This was an incredible learning experience and opened up the law to us in a very detailed and performative way. As part of their final programme, we were privileged to present our first public hearing of ‘In the Shadow of the State’, entitled The Voice Emerges [2].

 In March 2015, we initiated our application to the Arts Council’s ‘ART: 2016’ centenary programme, and were later shortlisted and awarded funding as one of nine open call projects across art forms. We then assembled our core team of collaborators: legal academic and activist Máiréad Enright, midwife Philomena Canning, composer Alma Kelliher, material culture historian Lisa Godson, photographer Miriam O’Connor and Derry-based curator/producer Sara Greavu. We realised the importance of site-specific live performance for the project, as a platform to test our collaborative voice, activate our research and share the expertise of our collaborators. We planned a series of four events in Ireland and the UK, comprising private legal workshops (to examine the ‘touch’ of the law, with an invited group of women) and subsequent public performances.

During the first year we developed Burn in Flames: Post-Patriarchal Archive in Circulation, which offered ways to perform the project rather than trying to describe it. We identified everyday objects and named them as evidence of the late-capitalist oppression of women. In an active form of critique, these items were imprinted with the Post-Patriarchal Archive stamp and placed back in circulation. Using a perfomative lecture and workshop format, we presented key research inquiries, such as the construction of ‘feminine hygiene’ or the nature of ‘patriarchal time’. Audience members were invited to bring their own materials to be stamped. We gave presentations in Ireland and the UK in a variety of community, activist and academic contexts, partly as a way to build an engaged audience for the project.

Of Milk and Marble was staged in Derry in March 2016, in a home frequently raided during the Troubles. It featured a single performer (Louise Mathews) at the kitchen table, for a day-long run of performances with small audiences of around a dozen people.

The Truncheon and the Speculum was staged in July as part of the Liverpool Biennial 2016. This live internet broadcast from the radical community bookshop News from Nowhere explored historic state violence enacted through gynaecological means. It identified the Contagious Diseases Acts of the 1860s as a key moment in the legislation of state violence against women. Featuring material culture historian Dr Lisa Godson and self-identified ‘cyborg witch’ Klau Kinky, of the Catalan collective Gynepunk, this performance proposed supplanting state-sanctioned broadcasts into domestic spaces. A transnational audience was invited to this online platform to question the terrestrial illegalities of reproductive rights for women.

Staged in September 2016 in the Pillar Room of the Rotunda Hospital (the first lying-in hospital in Ireland and the UK), The Touching Contract proposed new ways of understanding how we encounter the touch of the law every day, with and without consent. The immersive performance featured a soundscape composed by Alma Kelliher. A legal score, devised in collaboration with Máiréad Enright and an invited group of women in Dublin, determined how audience members chose to participate. The performance will be newly adapted and re-staged in November 2016, with a different cast, for the former juvenile courtroom in Toynbee Hall, London.

JL: What are your thoughts on the range of women’s campaigns and feminist projects that appear to have gained momentum this year? Do you think they have been heightened by the 1916 centenary, which has brought our relationship with the past into sharper focus?

JJ: I think we had a mature and brave centenary actually. It could have been a jingoistic nightmare, but I think overall there was an appetite for reflection. When you spoke to people they were linking it to the defeat of the water charges and to the fight for equality and anti- austerity. There was a feeling of responsibility, of not leaving it to the government to decide. The centenary was a great imaginative spark that really kicked off with Waking the Feminists, when the Abbey missed the zeitgeist and a backlash ensued. [3] An eruption of publicness emerged out of private conversations that women were having for a long time without being heard. When it started, it was like an avalanche.

I think the foundation was laid with the same-sex marriage referendum, in terms of society’s expectations for equality. As someone who is left-wing, I generally feel quite alienated from Irish politics, but the shared sense of victory felt after the vote for marriage equality was very empowering. We had achieved something that 10 years ago would have been impossible.

It was a loosening of the Catholic state noose and the prescribed arrangement that emerged from the fallout of the Irish Civil War. Over the last year, the pro-choice movement has gained momentum, with increased symbolic and public visibility bringing the campaign to the fore. It is a very hopeful and creative community – inventive and humorous in its dissent. In many ways, the interconnected issues of marriage equality, Waking the Feminists and repealing the Eighth are underpinned by the question: What kind of society, love, marriage, life, choices, autonomy do we want? Nobody ever asked us that before. It takes confidence to stand up and ask for these things. They require imagination. The centenary allowed these issues to be vocalised and there was an appetite for questioning from all sides.

When I was growing up during the Celtic Tiger, people were confident, but it was a shallow, material confidence: they could get a job, a good wage, travel, buy property and so on. I think we have a different type of confidence now that is more grounded in social issues, social change and the fact that we are all in it together. As artists, we intervened into that space to ask: What might our national culture look like if it embraced these experiences? How could it find radical and inventive ways to articulate itself, not as historical revision, but as a way to challenge fundamental ideas about art and how it relates to the political?

JL: You recently stated that women are only mentioned a handful of times in the 1937 Constitution of Ireland. Perhaps you could elaborate on how this document intersects with women’s everyday lives in the twenty-first century?

SB: ‘Woman’ is mentioned only three times in the Irish Constitution, in article 41.2 and in the Eighth Amendment, article 40.3.3°. Article 41.2 neatly conflates womanhood with motherhood and the institution of the family, in relation to work within the home, which is recognised as a ‘necessity’, ‘duty’ and ‘support’. The Eighth Amendment equates the right to life of a woman who is pregnant with that of a foetus. In effect, this means that Ireland is one of very few countries in the world that has a constitutional ban on abortion. However, what isn’t so widely discussed is that this article impacts on all issues of consent for pregnant women, for example requesting or refusing certain tests or procedures. This means that medical professionals act as legal interpreters. These legal artefacts attest to how we are viewed by the state. The Eighth Amendment hovers as an implied threat over all women living in Ireland who could become pregnant. Should this happen, we will live in a state of exception where our human rights are suspended.

JL: Can you outline some of the methods you have developed to document the project?

SB/JJ: We have worked hard to find sensitive, appropriate and critical means to document the project. The drafting sessions were for invited groups of women who remain anonymous unless they choose otherwise. These sessions were not recorded, videoed or photographed, but we took extensive notes, as did our legal collaborator, Máiréad Enright. We worked with two courtroom artists, Alwyn Gillespie and Priscilla Coleman, who made drawings of the proceedings. By using this strategy of representation, we could make evident the presence of law in everyday places and situations, while also respecting the participants’ privacy.

As artists who often work with moving image, we had the strong sense that we didn’t want the outcome of our work together (about tactility and the body) to take an image-based form. We delegated the visual sense of the project to our photographer-in-residence Miriam O’Connor, who created a photographic record that does not attempt to be ‘objective’ documentation. O’Connor photographed a series of key gestures devised and choreographed by performers, but we didn’t record the performances themselves, which are documented extensively through rumour and first person accounts. Traces of the project also exist online on our twitter account, @pparchive, and through the monthly newsletter we deliver to our mailing list subscribers via intheshadowofthestate.org.

Sarah Browne and Jesse Jones are visual artists based in Dublin. Their collaboration, as a feminist practice, brings together mutual concerns. They have each made numerous works within and outside gallery spaces, and have extensive experience working in collaborative contexts and through public art commissions.

Images: Sarah Browne and Jesse Jones, Of Milk and Marble, site-specific live performance by Louise Mathews, photo by Miriam O’Connor; ‘In the Shadow of the State’ legal drafting workshop, Dublin, 2016, drawing by Alwyn Gillespie; The Truncheon and the Speculum, still from live online broadcast written and directed by the artists, featuring Lisa Godson and Klau Kinky/Gynepunk and presented by the Liverpool Biennial and archived online.

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JOANNE LAWS INTERVIEWS ANDREW DUGGAN ABOUT ‘PROCLAMATION’, A MULTI-VENUE EXHBITION FUNDED BY CULTURE IRELAND.

Two neon signs in a field

A public act

What’s said?

‘It Only Remains’ (into the night)

(out of the dawn) ‘Until Such Time’

Explicit or evocative, for discourse or meditation

A spell to conjure a desired state of affairs

A declaration that a state of affairs pertains

Sounds: between crying and sighing

What’s projected?

The view from the house,

The after image and the image after,

Image of place as text in place

We were in two minds

The Irish and the English

In two tongues

In and out of place

An authentic nuclear past,

An eerie electric present

A proclamation

To stir, to rouse,

Propose, promote, provoke

Another Act:

The yearly inspections,

Five pounds for keeping to the Gaelic,

For a child in school in the 50s

After that:

A right decision

A hurtful aftermath

(Frances Hegarty and Andrew Stones, October 2016)

Joanne Laws: Was ‘PROCLAMATION’ conceived from the outset as a touring exhibition?

Andrew Duggan: From the beginning the project was intended to be presented in various international cultural spaces that would offer platforms for deeper explorations of both the artworks and the historical and cultural contexts. In spaces like the Irish Arts Center in New York, the Centre Culturel Irlandais in Paris and The EU Committee of the Regions in Brussels, understandings of Irish culture were a given.

I felt it was important to include artists from various disciplines, such as visual art, dance and performance, who would be unified through lens-based and moving-image sensibilities. As well as myself, the artists who exhibited as part of ‘PROCLAMATION’ were: Jazmin Chiodi and Alexandre Iseli, Olwen Fouéré and Kevin Abosch, Anthony Haughey, Frances Hegarty, Andrew Stones, Nigel Rolfe, John Scott and Jason Akira Somma. I thought that bringing together these important artists would create an interesting syntax of visual and verbal dialogues, offering an alternative to the anticipated 1916 commemorations in Ireland.

JL: What was your approach in leading the project? How does an artist-curator (as opposed to a curator, director or producer) influence a project in different ways?

AD: Rather than giving a brief, I invited the artists to contribute to a project where the centennial imperative would reframe ideas of place, language, equality and identity inherent both in the artists’ work and in the 1916 Proclamation. I trusted their integrity as well as their potential involvement and varied responses. I have encountered a certain amount of fear of artist-led projects among established curators in recognised institutions, particularly large traditional institutions. They fear that an artist-led project is a wild cat, a thing with an unforeseeable trajectory. For me, this unpredictability is a strength. I came of age in the nineties and early noughties, and saw the rise of the single (predominately white male) curator. In many ways, artist-led projects are the antithesis of such distantly-directed exhibitions.

I have received positive comments from the partners and venues, who feel that the insights offered by artist-curators (into the technicalities and philosophies of exhibition-making and the process of working with artists) are crucial to the transmission of the artworks. As an artist-curator, I had an almost symbiotic empathy with the artists and confidence in everyone involved. I may have brought the artists and institutions together, but artists like Jazmin Chiodi, Alex Iseli and Anthony Haughey ran with the project in their own ways, branching out and organising further artist-led events to extend the exhibition experience.

JL: In your view, how is the 1916 Proclamation relevant for modern Ireland?

AD: I cannot help but compare the 1916 Proclamation with the process of viewing art and understanding artist-led practice. The Proclamation was created within a particular time and context – ahead of its time in many ways – and it exists now, still resonating and influencing us. The 1916 Proclamation’s fervour, vision and imperfections are all manifest or perhaps hidden within the object itself. Like an artist-led project, the desire for unfettered control is clear. I was greatly taken by the opinion of Gerry Kearns, Professor of Geography at Maynooth University, who stated that “in fewer than 600 words, the Proclamation promises what independence will be for, laying a heavy obligation on future generations to be worthy of the sacrifice made in its name”. [1] For me, the 1916 Proclamation points us in the direction of what is possible and what remains unfulfilled. It is an object and a living document that should be taken from the political bodies that wish to control it and redistributed to public. As described by Olwen Fouéré, the Proclamation of 1916 “carried a great promise which many Irish people would regard as unfulfilled”. She believes that in the hundred years since it was written, “the time is way overdue for us to unearth the hidden histories, to listen to the code carriers, to embody the shadow and to discover what it is we still really need to fight for”.

JL: Perhaps you could describe some of the responses to the 1916 Proclamation that emerged in the work?

AD: All the artists share a great intensity and conviction. This is evident in the depth of the works they created and perhaps indicates a tide-change in Irish arts, where emotion, creativity and intellect can be interwoven.

Anthony Haughey described the importance of language to his work Manifesto, stating: “There are references to the 1916 Proclamation as well as historical and contemporary literature, evoked through cinematic camera movements and the exploration of liminal landscapes.” In the film, “a young African-Irish woman walks towards the viewer dressed in a military green coat. She is similar in age to many of Ireland’s 1916 revolutionaries and epitomises Connolly’s phantasy of egalitarian citizenship in a Republic-to-come, but like her predecessors, she is marginalised and erased from history before it is written”.

In the closing sequence, “the camera pans a windswept mountainside. In the distance, a small concrete square is cut into the bog. The camera moves slowly towards this object. The narrator describes a ‘300 mile open wound, running down the length of my spine’ (a reference to Chicana poet Gloria Anzaldúa). The camera finally reveals a concrete helicopter landing pad, a former British army outpost on Ireland’s border. The sequence fades to black”. To close, the narrator references Brian Friel’s Translations: “To remember everything is a form of madness.”

Jazmin Chiodi and Alexandre Iseli’s film, A thing is a thing is a thing is something else… addresses embodiment and “examines the tension between proclamations of intention and physical realisation”. Opposed by “flesh, memory, culture and structures, both individual and social”, true realisations of idealised change are frequently resisted on many levels.

John Scott and Jason Akira Somma described being inspired to “rediscover the Proclamation in the context of the world today, particularly in view of the decrease in civil liberties that is creeping into Irish life and society as a whole”. They continued: “Thinking about the aspirations of the Proclamation in the context of the current climate of xenophobia and racism against refugees made us realise more than ever the importance and beauty of our text. In our work, poetic words come out of the mouths of drowning refugees – non-Irish born people, submerged in water and trying to speak in gasps. The water is a place of transition – of birth or death – that is neither land nor country. The 1916 Proclamation text inspired the performers in our film, who were very moved by how relevant it is today. They did not have any deep knowledge of the Irish War of Independence or the Easter Rising. This message has been lost in continuing to reconcile Irish unity and the Troubles”.

 JL: Can you give details about the work you developed for the project, situating it in relation to your ongoing research interests?

AD: Siobhán Dempsey, a camera person with a background in ethnography, and I developed the film Plus ça Change with a Russian immigrant named Ирина Быстрова (Irina Bystrov) in Ireland. Ирина shifts rubble from one pile to another and back again, not unlike the mythological figure Sisyphus, who was made to carry out a laborious, repetitive and futile action for all eternity. Plus ça Change pits two fundamental human conditions against each other: the resigned acknowledgment of the fundamental immutability of human nature and the enduring desire to effect change through praxis. Through the woman’s repetitive and recursive action, Plus ça Change metaphysically meditates on the paradox of change: the ‘void’ is built and un-built. It is not complacent viewing and the relationship between the work and the viewer is important. Action is halted by an off-camera voice, presumed to be a director, revealing that all forms of witnessing are constructed.

JL: Your commissioned works often interrogate or respond to artworks housed in civic collections. Can you describe your ongoing relationship with the historic?

AD: Artist Nigel Rolfe asks the question “Do we live in history or does history live within us?” I feel that I have an ongoing conversation, as I suspect many artists do, with previous artworks. It’s a conversation not unlike the one Pearse and Connolly may have had before drawing up the 1916 Proclamation, where the present and past were consolidated. In some ways artists continue discussions that began in the past but persist in the present. National institutions understand this continuum and are surprisingly open to such dialogue.

JL: How do you feel about the different iterations of ‘PROCLAMATION’ across different exhibition contexts and locations?

AD: Nigel Rolfe described the audience responses to ‘PROCLAMATION’ as “heartening, thoughtful and generous, with the artworks raising societal issues and inquiries into meaning”. Since it first opened in New York, the social, political and cultural landscapes have changed dramatically. The bombings in Brussels and Paris, and Britain’s exit from the European Union, have influenced perceptions and readings of the work. Anthony Haughey’s references to the “310-mile-long open wound – divided culture running down the length of my body” in Manifesto, seem even more poignant now, as does Rolfe’s commentary on the shifting definitions of ‘border’. In each of the cities in which we have exhibited, real concerns have been proclaimed. The project has created connections between art, artists, audiences and institutions, and seems to have prompted debate well beyond the discourse implied within the work itself.

‘PROCLAMATION’ is a multi-venue exhibition of new lens-based and moving-image works by leading figures in Irish visual art, dance and performance. It is supported by Culture Ireland’s International Programme for 2016, which celebrates the centenary of the 1916 Easter Rising.

Andrew Duggan is an Irish artist whose video works, installations and projects explore the complex relationships between self and place. Duggan makes work and leads projects which bring artist and institutions, art and ideas together in new dynamic ways. Previous projects have led to new lens based works by artists from various creative disciplines.

Images: Anthony Haughey, HD still from Manifesto and John Scott and Jason Akira Somma, part of ‘PROCLAMATION’, 2016.

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Sarah Browne and Jesse Jones, the Rotunda Hospital Pillar Room, Dublin, 23 – 25 September 2016

The day of the second public performance of Jesse Jones and Sarah Browne’s The Touching Contract fell on a date of heightened emotion for women in Ireland, taking place just hours after Dublin saw thousands take to the streets in the fifth annual March for Choice, part of the campaign demanding that the government repeal the Eighth Amendment. The atmosphere in the Rotunda Pillar Room’s ante-chamber was withdrawn and respectful; the audience appeared fragile.

The third chapter of four performative works in the pair’s first collaboration ‘In the Shadow of the State’ was devised in consultation with local women. [1] Feminist legal scholar Mairead Enright wrote the ‘legal score’ for the work, drawing on the archive of legal documents relating to the treatment of Irish women by the state and by the medical profession, both here and in the UK. This source material reveals a sorry history of medical misdemeanors and the enforced adoption of illegitimate children. The artists view this legacy as a history of violence against women and, given the horrors endured by survivors of symphysiotomy [2] and those who suffered incarceration at the hands of the church (in the Magdalene Laundries for example), it is difficult to argue otherwise.

Against this backdrop, the audience was required to read a set of terms and conditions, before filling in and signing a contract of consent to be touched during the activation of the work. This prompted an instantaneous wariness in me as a viewer – now a ‘participant’ – as the legalese hinted that the territory ahead might prove unnerving. “Participants shall not bring or cause or permit to be brought into the Performance any fragile hopes or expectations for the state or its laws” warned the terms. “…Notwithstanding the foregoing, any such expectations of or aspirations are carried at Participants’ entire risk”. [3]

Before entering the main performance space, participants were required to complete a contract giving their consent to be touched in a variety of ways: sexual, violent, medical, paternal – even sonic. There was the option to refuse consent and instead to act as ‘witness’, in which case one’s senses would be impeded with a blindfold and earplugs.

The scene was now set – emulating the experience of being admitted to an institution – and participants finally entered the Pillar Room. Performers dressed in pale blue and wearing nurse-like white shoes sat and stood around, waiting to be activated by the chime of a triangle, signifying the initiation of The Touching Contract.

Moving between the standing participants, the performers approached and retreated, in a loosely coordinated choreography of gestures and unspoken instructions. This voiceless show started timidly, with the performers offering participants a listen from their MP3 players (I was given a blast of Baby it’s Cold Outside), then slowly grew in intensity as they mimed washing and inspecting their hands, framed the cleft between their legs with forefingers and thumbs to form the shape of a triangle – a woman’s sex – then raised their hands over their faces, snapping their teeth and grimacing. Jamaican pop reggae band Inner Circle’s 1992 hit Sweat (A La La La La Long) boomed throughout the room.

The performers ran through the crowd in a seemingly random sequence, at one point gathering a few male participants together. Some threw themselves at our feet, crying out or soundlessly crumpling to the floor. They reached out, beseeching us to take their hands, and then drew us closer together in an intimate huddle. Finally, each one of us was led out of the Pillar Room, in many cases embracing the performer before leaving. Back in the ante room, we were given tea and toast, like so many newly-minted mothers.

It was a visceral and consuming work. With its immersive nature (the hand of Anu Productions evident) and accelerated references to what we now know about the treatment of the Magdalene victims and the experimentation on Irish women by surgeons who split bodies and removed wombs with impunity, it felt like a kind of assault. It was a missile lobbed at the shocking complicity of the agencies that perpetuated these actions, even after the fact.

In a recent issue of Art Monthly, writer Morgan Quaintance argued vigorously for the pressing need for socially engaged work to “inform, empower and support the public by presenting and elucidating the subject matter of works dealing with contemporary socio-cultural and political realities that, through bias, oversight or lack of interest, are not presented elsewhere”. [4] Though he was discussing such work in the UK, the ferocity and conviction of The Touching Contract proves an unassailable force in the face of such oversight – the political as absolutely personal.

Anne Mullee is an art writer and curator of the Courthouse Gallery and Studios in Ennistymon, County Clare.

Images: Sarah Browne and Jesse Jones, The Touching Contract, 2016, performed by Deirdre Murphy; photos by Miriam O’Connor.

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Paul Murnaghan, Limerick City Gallery of Art, 15 September – 30 October 2016

Paul Murnaghan’s exhibition ‘All Mountains Are Moving’ explores archaic belief systems by courting wonderment and superstition. This new body of work refers to outmoded ways of magical thinking, but also arouses a sense of mystery in the viewer through a clever use of materials and techniques that make us question what we are seeing.

‘All Mountains Are Moving’ is exhibited upstairs in Limerick City Gallery of Art across numerous rooms around the square first floor balcony space above the Atrium Gallery. The first room on the right omits a yellowy glow, created by an orange stain on the glass window. In the middle of the room is the sculptural work The stars don’t shine upon us, we’re in the way of their light. This is composed of an unlikely and precarious combination of materials, including an arching arm of plastic covered in fake leather, which is held up by part of a peeled tree branch. Nothing is fixed, but rather employs and seems to transcend the laws of gravity. At one end of the arm is an antique weight which roots the structure to the floor. At the elevated end is a hoover-like mouth with synthetic orange rope hanging from its end. Above this, and at the peak of the arch, is a levitating feather-covered ball that rotates slowly around in the air. This element of the sculpture is captivating and introduces the pervasive sense of mystery and magic that permeates the exhibition. The feather ball also adds an air of fragility to the piece as all the disjointed materials appear to be harmoniously balanced, yet could fall apart at any moment. Through its materiality, The Stars … recalls a lineage of conceptual sculpture by combining the drama of Richard Serra’s balancing steel works with the natural materials of ritualistic practices used in the sculptural installations of self-appointed shaman Joseph Beuys.

In the corner of the balcony space is the work Balance, which reinforces this comparison. Balance is composed of a lead sculpture resting atop an antique wooden pedestal. It looks as if it should fall over, as one of the legs is shorter than the others. The sculpture is an intricate web of forms and was made by pouring molten lead into water. When these two substances come into contact the metal crystallises into elaborate patterns, a process known as molybdomancy, which originated in Ancient Greece where it was used to tell the future. Despite the many references to divination and mysticism, the self-serious persona of Beuys does not apply to Murnaghan, who instead presents these ritualistic practices in a refreshing, childlike way. In its entirety, the exhibition is playful and inquisitive, prompting us to look with fresh eyes at the materials and at our belief systems.

The biggest of the upper-floor rooms holds a diorama of miniature gold animals, most of which are hybrid species, combining, for example, the body of a goat with a fish tail for a head. These animals converge around a flickering lake on a bed of fake fur. Scattered around them are pebbles that have been split in half by the artist’s grandfather Loftus Lowndes. The humble pebble becomes an object of fascination as the diorama is juxtaposed with a large-scale projection, 100 Stones. This comprises still images of the split stones, intensely magnified, accompanied by ambient music and the sound of a high symbol or triangle, which brings to mind eastern religious practices. The projection is immersive, hypnotic and meditative. The rusty orange and grey-blue patterns in the stones evoke the expansiveness of the cosmos and this gives rise to the elusive perception of something essential and primordial in what was previously small and insignificant.

‘All Mountains Are Moving’ gently prompts us to reflect on the meaning of life and the meaning of death. This reaches its climax as we move around the space and into the final room. Here, a more sombre sculptural installation is made up of, among other things, the donated ashes of a man named Robert Paulson. These have been emptied onto another antique pedestal. It is unusual to see the ashes of the deceased, which normally remain out of sight, concealed within an urn, buried underground or scattered into the wind. Offered up for visual contemplation, the ashes are surprisingly voluminous. Looking closely, chips of bone are visible. Somehow, studying these remains doesn’t feel morbid, but rather testifies to the interconnectedness of things as Murnaghan again grounds us in the matter of the world. ‘All Mountains Are Moving’ invites us to contemplate the relationship between small stones and the cosmos, between these ashes and ourselves: our return from dust to dust.

Kirstie North is an independent writer, curator and artist who teaches History of Art at University College Cork.

Images: Paul Murnaghan, The stars don’t shine upon us, we’re in the way of their light and Balance.

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John Coyle and Gary Coyle, The Dock, Carrick-on-Shannon, 10 September – 12 November  

‘Now Came Still Evening On’ is a unique exhibition presenting the work of father and son John and Gary Coyle. John’s intimate paintings occupy The Dock’s light and airy Gallery One while Gary has created a vast immersive installation in the largest of The Dock’s three galleries.

John Coyle’s paintings and drawings depict scenes and people close to his studio and home. The works have a conciseness and authority clearly developed over a long career. They are reminiscent of the intimiste paintings of Vuillard and Bonnard, and of works by their more northerly descendants in Dublin and London.

The paintings are rooted in empirical study, in the act of looking closely and analysing the world close at hand. They seem to flow from a desire to understand and to convey the poetry of the everyday. Although the visual language can be traced back to Post-Impressionism, these works are completely contemporary, presenting an unfiltered response to the world as it is right now. The sympathetic hanging of the works helps further convey their sense of contemporaneity.

In Old Boat Dun Laoghaire (2014) the taut construction of interlocking planes edges towards abstraction. At the point when the painting might become an abstract configuration, Coyle brings the viewer back to an awareness of the motif. This friction between the object depicted and the formal language deployed to represent it is evident in Flowers Still Life (2015), where the welter of brush marks threatens to dissipate the image. Here, again, Coyle brings the viewer back from a tipping point with just enough information about the vase and flowers.

The to and fro between representation and abstraction is a result of looking really hard and bringing to each picture an awareness of the endless possibilities of the language of painting. In Now Come Still Evening On (Clarinda Park) (2014) Coyle has captured the fading evening light in a painting that is close to dissolving in front us. In choosing a title from Milton, he has asserted his faith in finding the potential for greatness in the everyday.

A sense of magic in the everyday is a theme that also runs through Gary Coyle’s work, as does a profound engagement with art from the past. His installation is situated in a darkened room where the viewer is dazzled by the installation’s sheer scale and intensity of colour. The gallery has been papered floor to ceiling in a bright green vinyl drawing of a forest. The woodland scene acts as wallpaper, rather like the elegant flock papers in eighteenth-century salons. On top of it there are charcoal drawings displayed in a salon-style hang, complete with their own meticulously drawn baroque frames.

The forest depicted in The Dark Woods (2016) is Coole Park, a key site in the Irish literary revival where W.B. Yeats went looking for fairies with Lady Gregory. The woodland setting is a continuation of a theme first explored in Coyle’s 2015 RHA exhibition ‘Into the Woods’, which depicted the forest in Montana that was home to the environmental terrorist known as the Unabomber. The woodland scene in ‘The Dark Woods’ is an environment where anything can happen, a place that is real and also surreal.

The imagery in the charcoal drawings, of cats and chickens and clowns, is derived from the internet. Coyle lovingly re-works these ubiquitous images, which are consumed in their millions all around the world. The images are drawn on heavyweight paper in a process involving great care. They are revised, erased and redrawn until they are right.

The drawings in tandem with the wallpaper reflect on our problematic relationship with nature. The choice of cats is apt, as they are both familiar and unfathomable creatures. They represent our unease with nature and the uncanny within the familiar. Nature in Coyle’s work is like one of the thoroughbred cats in his drawings: having been manipulated by man, their future actions are unclear and possibly not benign.

A significant aspect of the work is the presence of kitsch. In Venus (2015 – 2016) Coyle depicts an oven-ready chicken against a background derived from Titian’s Venus and Cupid with an Organist (1548 – 1549). Coyle explores kitsch in art history and contemporary popular culture, as well as on the internet. Of the artists Coyle quotes or alludes to, Titian is often seen as beyond reproach. Others, such as Watteau, are frequently viewed as populist or superficial. Coyle presents a subtle examination of the workings of taste over time and our shifting relationships with images.

There is something subversive about the artist’s deployment of such overt levels of skill and even more so in the evident pleasure he takes in process. The works play with ideas of scale. Subjects that are immediate and close at hand, like the domestic animals, provide a counterpoint to the expansive woodland backdrops. One is also reminded of the vastness of the internet. From this superabundance of images and stimuli, Coyle creates a spectacle and at the same time presents multi-layered and contemplative objects. His work is so infused with irony that it is not ironic at all. The effect is the opposite of the ironic pall that surrounds so much contemporary work made in traditional media. In choosing to explore popular culture and the history of art simultaneously, Coyle presents the viewer with a visual feast.

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

Images: Gary Coyle, The Dark Woods, ‘Now Came Still Evening On’ installation view, 2016; John Coyle, Tennis Courts – Dun Laoghaire, 2012, The Dock; photos by Keith Nolan.

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Tom Climent, Eamon Colman, William Crozier, Neal Greig, Eilís O’Connell, Peter Martin, James McCreary, Michael Ray, Conor Walton, Catherine Hammond Gallery, Skibbereen, County Cork, 9 September – 19 October    

The stated aim of this group exhibition was to explore and interpret the idea and theme ‘Glow’, visually echoing the shift from late summer into autumn, whether experienced as a continuous radiant beam from a light source, the result of energy produced by vibrating electric colours or, contrastingly, through the gentle light of changing luminosity.

Eamon Colman’s two large oils on paper, Seeking refuge, the green earth turned towards the river and Morning swim by the Sultan’s tower introduce a strong warm presence at the front of the gallery with their swathes of expressionistic colour and addictive energy. Referencing landscape, they can be read equally as abstract gesture.

A similarly warm palette underpins Tom Climent’s paintings, The Heart Waits and The Heart Holds. However, the surface and paint treatment is denser and more textured, seeming to absorb light and forcing us to concentrate on the underlying structures depicted. Climent also holds back from precise definition of his subject, leaving the viewer to interpret his geometric, irregularly-patterned and subtly-coloured forms. The balance between representation and abstraction is cleverly construed. We could read these as town or mountain scapes, or as some other inner pictorial place, and it’s refreshing that it doesn’t really matter.

In William Crozier’s large carborundum print The Lure of Evening, the fading light bathes a hillside in dappled greys, dark blues and off-whites. The deep shadow of foreground foliage contrasts with the dusk light. It is strongly atmospheric and channels the theme with gentle luminosity. James McCreary’s prints in muted tones, October Moon and Autumn Leaves, draw us into his microscopically elegant treatment of glowing leaves floating on dark backgrounds.

Light is essential for Eilís O’Connell’s Deálan/Burning Coal, an irregularly-curved cast-resin object mounted at shoulder height on awall near a side window. Its smooth surface is infused with amber tones, like swirling galaxies trapped within. The quiet but strong presence of this work gave the fullest interpretation of the overall theme. The other sculptural piece, Michael Ray’s Melt 1, is a translucent ice-blue cone made from kiln-cast crystal. It is a cooler, more formal piece that works in more subtle ways.

Conor Walton shows two small realist still life works. An open pound of butter is exactly what you get in Butter. All rich yellow dairy substance and golden foil, it is a beautiful work which stands out among the various landscapes. Hanging above this, A Jug of Milk is more subtle, with a single white highlight on the surface of the jug. Walton’s third painting, Burning, depicts, in ochre-orange tones, a full-length male nude running and holding a flaming torch, its fire engulfing his head and upper body. While technically impressive, it seems startling and incongruous here, and a less subtle interpretation of the exhibition theme.

Initially, Peter Martin’s lighted stained-glass cityscapes in wooden frames might also seem out of place. Deep black borders give these works a strong filmic feel. Wrapped in Walls depict public housing and city landmarks brightly drawn against deep-coloured night skies populated with angry-looking clouds. The distant tower of Shandon Church situates us on Cork’s northside, a boarded-up shop beside some houses bringing forth a sense of social deprivation. There is character and strength in how this subject matter is worked through a medium which is usually used for more abstract or ethereal themes.

Finally, I returned more than once to Neil Greig’s three oil paintings, unable to quite pin them down in the context. Knockmanny, Kilvey Lake and Whitethorns offer robust depictions of a woodland, a lakeside and a rough hillside respectively. Lightly-dappled encaustic floats across the surfaces with gestural highlighting of grasses, reeds and leaves. Such an intense combination of effects is somewhat unfashionable these days. The painterly treatment is very different from the fluid expressionism of Colman or Crozier’s works, or the calm measured structures of Climent. While located in the Irish countryside, the locations depicted seem idealised. Knockmanny could be a woodland scene in warmer climes, while Kilvey Lake reminded me of a fast-flowing North American river scene. Several approaches to painting are combined with great technical flair and intensity. Despite the risks involved, the works are far from academic or staid, and their rich and varied palette is fresh and lively.

Curated by Maureen O’Sulllivan, this is a very reflective and intelligent selection of work, arranged to make best use of the bright, naturally-lit space. The challenge of demonstrating a consistent theme across a group show, without ascribing excessive meaning or interpretation, is well achieved.

Colm Desmond is an artist based in Dublin.

Image: ‘Glow’ installation view, photo by Colm Desmond.

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