The final issue of 2018 is loosely themed around several prominent anniversaries being celebrated this year, offering a retrospective glance at the evolution of various Irish arts organisations.

Given the upcoming 40th anniversary of Visual Artists Ireland in 2020, we are currently working on the SSI/VAN archive (which extends back to 1980), with a view to mobilising some of this archival material during VAI’s anniversary year.

This issue inclues an edited version of an important panel discussion, organised as part of a year-long programme to mark the fortieth anniversary of the Douglas Hyde Gallery. In other organisation profiles, Declan Long reflects on 30 years of the Kerlin Gallery, while Pádraic E. Moore interviews Oonagh Young about the tenth year of her Dublin gallery. In the Belfast context, Siobhán Kelly outlines upcoming events to mark 25 years of Catalyst Arts, while Jane Morrow discusses the 25th anniversary of the University of Atypical. This year also marks the fiftieth anniversary of Derry’s Civil Rights Movement, so we asked Sara Greavu to interview artist Helen Cammock about her new film, The Long Note, commissioned by Void, Derry, which explores the involvement of women in the 1968 movement. Annette Maloney, Sinead O’Reilly and Sally O’Leary reflect on another key anniversary for the Irish visual arts – 40 years since the launch of the Per Cent for Art scheme.

We also have reports on several long-running projects: Nathan O’Donnell discusses various strands of the ongoing public art project, ‘In Context 4’, while Gráinne Coughlan reports on ‘Practice and Power’, the closing event of a four-year European project led by Create. International perspectives are offered by Kathy Tynan, who reports from her residency at the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris, and Jonathan Carroll, who discusses the Dora García retrospective at the Museo Reina Sofía in Madrid.

The Regional Profile for this issue comes from County Clare, with organisational insights from Conor McGrady (Dean of Academic Affairs at Burren College of Art), Sinead Cahill (Gallery Manager at Glór, Ennis) and Anne Mullee (Curator of Courthouse Gallery & Studios, Ennistymon). Michaële Cutaya reports from ‘Out of Place’, a recent exhibition and seminar at Courthouse, while artists Amanda Dunsmore, Tanya Harris and Kaye Maahs discuss the realities of maintaining an arts practice in the region.

Reviewed in the Critique section are: ‘Lavish and Judicious’ at CCA Derry-Londonderry; Theresa Nanigian at Highlanes Gallery; Phil Collins at The MAC; ‘Museum of Mythological Water Beasts’ at Ormston House; and ‘My comfort and my joy’ at the Douglas Hyde Gallery. As ever, we have details of the upcoming VAI Professional Development Programme, exhibition and public art roundups, news from the sector and current opportunities.

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INVITED ARTISTS AND THINKERS DISCUSS THE HISTORY OF THE DOUGLAS HYDE GALLERY ON ITS 40TH ANNIVERSARY.

This is an abridged version of a public conversation that took place on 17 May at The Douglas Hyde Gallery, as part of a year-long programme marking the gallery’s fortieth anniversary. The panel, chaired by Caoimhín Mac Giolla Léith and introduced by current DHg director Georgina Jackson, comprised artists who have previously had major solo exhibitions at the DHg. Each artist took the opportunity to reflect on the significant influence the DHg has had on their relationship with contemporary art.

Georgina Jackson: The Douglas Hyde Gallery holds an incredibly important space in Dublin, in Ireland and internationally. When Alice Maher was talking about her first important solo exhibition here in 1994, when IMMA was still in its infancy, she described the DHg as “the most important venue in Ireland and a launching pad for all aspiring artists. Everyone went there, everyone wanted to show there – it was a fulcrum of energy and a powerful place”. The gallery emerged out of the infectious enthusiasm and curiosity of a figure called George Dawson, a professor of genetics here in Trinity, who acknowledged the importance of artists, and art as necessary within the lives of students, Trinity College and beyond. This is a celebration of 40 years of the DHg and the many more years to come.

Caoimhín Mac Giolla Léith: I have had a long relationship with The Douglas Hyde Gallery, which includes 17 years as a board member; so I get to go first, as Methuselah and seanchaí, and say a few words about my memories of the gallery. I was vaguely familiar with the Douglas Hyde as an exhibition venue in the early 1980s, as a student in UCD. The memory is hazy, but punctuated by a very vivid recollection of an Ed Kienholz show, ‘Tableaux’, in 1981.¹ Other memories from the early years – the pre-John Hutchinson years, if you like – included the first show that really took my breath away, in a purely spectacular fashion, for the scale of its ambition: Anselm Kiefer’s ‘Jason and the Argonauts’ show in 1990, when Medb Ruane was at the helm.² More formative for me, as I was beginning to write about art, locally at first, was a series of exhibitions (in the transition into John Hutchinson’s tenure as director of the DHg) charting Irish art in the 1980s – four or five group shows organised thematically. But my most memorable show of the 90s, which in some ways was life-changing, was the show ‘Chlorosis’ by Marlene Dumas in 1994³, which I recall very vividly for a number of reasons. Firstly, I had no expectations. I wasn’t entirely sure what I was going to, it was a busy day, I was late to meet someone. I distinctly remember coming all the way down the stairs, out of breath, apologetic, looking for the person I was late to meet, finding him, saying sorry and then looking around. And just behind me was the title piece, a huge bank of watercolours on paper – a signature medium of Marlene Dumas then and now – and many other works, which completely stunned me. That was the beginning of a long interest in Marlene’s work, about which I’ve written several times, and a friendship I value.

Now, in order to indicate some notion of historical progression or chronology, I’m going to ask the artists to speak in the order in which they showed over the years.

Willie Doherty: I’m old enough to remember the DHg when it was a much younger institution. I was an art student in Belfast and I think there was a lot of excitement about the potential of this new gallery that had opened in Dublin, because these were in the days before IMMA. I think the art world generally felt that there really was a place for a dedicated art gallery that was serious, professional and had some relationship, not just with the city of Dublin and Trinity College, but with the rest of the world as well. So, there was always a degree of excitement around the exhibitions in the DHg and the ambition and scope that the gallery stood for. I actually took part in a group exhibition here in 1981 called ‘The Irish Exhibition of Living Art’, which I think may have happened every couple of years.⁴ I graduated from art school in Belfast in the summer of 1981 and to my surprise, they accepted a large photographic work that I’d made on three or four panels. That was quite a thing for a young artist who’d just left art school, to have a piece of work selected for an exhibition here. Like every young artist, you’re working from a position of invisibility and hoping your work might get somewhere. The first solo show I had here was in 1993. The work that I made was in some ways shaped by the architecture of the gallery itself. One of the things I’ve always liked about this gallery is you enter from the street and then you get this view from the balcony down into the space. I think it’s quite a unique perspective – you navigate the space from this entry point above. In that sense, the space has always presented a series of challenges for artists. Over the years, the way in which respective directors have understood the space evolved as the space evolved. Some of the shows John Hutchinson curated here really demonstrated a clear understanding of the dynamic of this architecture and the installation of the works here were often disarmingly simple, but complex at the same time. It’s always been for me a really important and very dynamic place, both as an artist and as a visitor.

Willie Doherty had solo exhibitions at the DHg in 1993 and again in 2008. He is a current board member of the gallery.

Gerard Byrne: Because I’m from Dublin, I feel like I’ve a very long history with the space. For me, something that’s really central for the DHg overall, has always been connecting practices in Ireland with practices that are centred elsewhere – I think that’s a really important gesture. Obviously, the Kiefer show was important because it was a blockbuster ⁵, but I remember the Bill Viola show here and that was really, really important.⁶ Viola came as a visiting artist to NCAD. Because it was media art, it felt very, very new at the time. I also have quite a palpable memory of Cecily Brennan’s show here in the early 90s – very large charcoal drawings from County Wicklow.⁷ I remember a feature in the Sunday Tribune on Cecily Brennan. An artist being written about in a newspaper – that was kind of a big deal in Ireland at the time. It was the first time I was able to make a connection between seeing something in a gallery space and actually having some sense of who that artist is, as a person. I somehow got involved in installing the shows at the DHg and that was a brilliant experience. The first show we installed was Jimmie Durham, which was an amazing show that came from the ICA in London.⁸ It was just so beautiful – I’ve loved his work ever since. Another very fond memory was the ‘Kalachakra Sand Mandala’ made by Tibetan Buddhist monks.⁹ My own show in 2002 was curated by Annie Fletcher. I made a photograph of Dorothy Walker specifically for the show, as I knew Dorothy through her son Corban. I don’t quite know what my rationale was for including it, except that somehow it spoke to the history of this place. I also made a work, New Sexual Lifestyles. I filmed it in the famous Goulding Summerhouse in Wicklow, designed by Ronnie Tallon of Scott-Tallon-Walker architects. Basil Goulding and Dorothy Walker were involved in a certain moment in Irish art, around the time when the DHg was formed in the late 70s. I was interested in somehow having that present in my show.

Gerard Byrne had a solo exhibition, ‘Herald or Press’, at the DHg in 2002. ‘A Visibility Matrix’ by Sven Anderson and Byrne was presented in the summer of 2018.

Isabel Nolan: Like Gerard, I have multiple relations with this space. It wasn’t until probably third or fourth year (in NCAD) that I started coming here regularly. I remember Marlene Dumas gave a talk and that was a phenomenal moment. But I think she still seemed so far away, and an artist seemed like such an abstract thing, that I didn’t really connect to it. In NCAD, everyone was talking about postmodernism, making collages and looking at Brit art. There was a lot of irony around at the time and I found it really uninteresting. Anyway, I walked in here one day, I was the only person in the space and there was an exhibition of these sulphurous, menacing, what seemed to me very large paintings by this Irish person called Patrick Hall, and I was blown away and I had this very simple insight that it’s ok to be thinking about death.¹⁰ I remember Bill Viola’s ‘The Messenger’ show was the first show that I absolutely hated. I thought I’d acquired some sort of criticality because I had the capacity to hate a show. I also spent a period here being a technician. Watching artists install their work, working in such a specific space with one curator, and looking at the way in which John worked with all of these different people and how they dealt with this space, was just phenomenal. It would go from someone like Miroslaw Balka¹¹, who was this great big bear of a man, and kind of macho in a way, but the precision and exacting nature of his demands around making sure the show was correct. And then there was Koo Jeong-A, who had this show that was incredibly mysterious, called ‘The Land of Ousss’.¹² I would wait all day for her to ask me to do something and she really didn’t need me. And I’d come in the next morning and a roll of Sellotape would have been moved one foot. You’d go, wow, it’s better. Mike Nelson…  blew my mind because this space was quite empty with images around the walls and a whole installation underneath the stairs.¹³ So, to see all of that range of people and to watch it unfolding up close was really amazing. I was asked recently to write something about which artists have influenced me. It turns out that, at one point or another, most of them have shown here. For me, there’s something about this space and the architecture that, unlike many other galleries, has this incredible physicality and there’s something about coming in here and giving yourself over to the space. It’s a gallery you have a very bodily relationship with. And there was something special about the reliability of the DHg that it was going to offer something that was complex and kind of challenging and fascinating. I won’t keep going.

Isabel Nolan presented ‘The Paradise [29]’ at the DHg in 2008, while her solo exhibition, ‘Calling on Gravity’, was presented in 2017.

Mairead O’hEocha: It’s funny that you mentioned [Nelson’s] ‘Tourist Hotel’. That’s a really vivid memory for me, because he radically inverted the space. You came in here and there was a ‘fake show’. You went down the back and you stumbled into darkness. There were dirty sleeping bags, matchboxes with incense in them, coins, Disney masks. There were portable TVs with just the snow staring back at you. I hadn’t actually encountered an exhibition that so cleverly took on the space. He set a labyrinth of questions around culture, space and politics that left you delighted and confused. David Byrne’s How Music Works talks about creation in the reverse and how people have an assumption around musicians that they write, and the song comes out fully-formed. He said the reality is 180 degrees from that. And he always considers the venue when he’s making work. He goes on to explain how African music, for instance, evolved and is quite percussive as it is played and heard outdoors, while choral music has very long reverbs and because of the architecture of churches, the notes get extended. I think what he’s saying is actually quite relevant to contemporary art. Mike Nelson’s work was completely this idea of creation in a reverse. I was thinking about that, and how for the first show I had in the main gallery I started making this giant painting, as a curveball to the small paintings. In the end I didn’t actually include it at all, but it connected back to this idea of creating in reverse. When I had the subsequent show in Gallery 2, I was very aware of the small space not having any windows. I made a series of four paintings where each painting has its own light source, so they emit their own light – a fluorescent light, a flashlight, a kind of hallucinatory daylight. That space, Gallery 2, was always interesting, because its ethnographic objects seemed to really undermine the contemporary art in the main space – it seemed to have a clarity of purpose and intention behind it. I actually really liked that strange tension.

Mairead O’hEocha has shown in group and solo exhibitions at the DHg in 2011 and 2014 respectively.

Sam Keogh: I’m going to tell a very short anecdote about the Cathy Wilkes show here in 2004.¹⁴ I was about 16 or 17 and came in with a group from my secondary school. My memories of some of the works are kind of smudged together. There was the top of a baby wipes box, which was turquoise, and in my mind, there was some words smeared in paint or shit – something brown. But looking at the documentation that exists, there wasn’t anything on it. There were paintings on the wall that I don’t actually remember, and there were these semi-figurative, minimal sculptures, made of wood and bits of metal, on these kind of metal stands. They were all over the floor. Some of them were maybe tipped over. And there was a belt sander on the floor, which kind of threatened these wooden objects with being turned into sawdust. The main thing I remember was the reaction of my classmates. There was a bunch of lads in my class who were quite confident, and I wasn’t – I was quite awkward. They really didn’t like the idea that they should be looking at this stuff and considering it as art. Their paranoia made me feel like this bunch of stuff in a room was on my side. It made me think maybe there’s something to this enterprise of arranging things in a room, which is art. It was my first experience of seeing that there was a weird visual language being hammered out by somebody, that was separate from the way you might usually talk to someone. I trusted that she was trying to communicate something that was nearly impossible to communicate. That was a very weird and exciting thing to be presented with. How do we make a new language?

Sam Keogh’s work featured in the group exhibition, ‘Dukkha’, at the DHg in 2014, while his solo show, ‘Four Fold’, was presented in the gallery in 2015.

Sean Lynch: I want to make a bit of a counter-point about the incredible space here. It’s only open seven hours a day. A lot of hours of the day, the gallery is closed. I wonder how it performs during that time? At night time, when the gallery is closed, we’re all in different places. Good gallery spaces have the ability to transcend their physicality. They find themselves in different places at different times in people’s heads, trying to maybe be articulate, sometimes being verbalised in conversation, or just staying as a big empty space in your head as well, with the potentiality of multiple forms of art. I was too young to see Nicola Gordon-Bowe’s exhibition on Harry Clarke here, so she had to tell me about it.¹⁵ These particular strata that exist here – I’m interested in how we begin to understand them in conversation, before and after presentation, how they link communities together, and how they keep places like this as very relevant centres. You know, you’re all touching the ground of the Douglas Hyde Gallery now, which is touching Trinity, which is touching Dublin, touching the Atlantic, touching China… Somehow, we make our realities out of this flesh of the ground. Having an exhibition here last year was a very joyful time for me. My family and I were living in Vancouver and we moved back to Dublin for the duration of the show. I got to spend lots of time in the gallery, hanging out with the staff here and that’s a rarity sometimes, to have with an exhibition. I had such a gleeful and wonderful time with Rachel McIntyre working on the show. Michael Hill pointed at all the children’s drawings that you can see in the gallery space, done by kids on school tours. They’re still all here, not hidden away in different parts of the concrete. Sometimes you’ve made a show and you’re gone the next day. I felt a great sense of community here and it’s a very joyful place.

‘A Walk Through Time’ and ‘What Is An Apparatus’ by Sean Lynch were presented at the DHg in 2017.

The Douglas Hyde Gallery was founded by the Arts Council and Trinity College Dublin and opened on 1 March 1978.

Notes
¹ Ed Kienholz, ‘Tableaux 1961-79’, 1981.
² Anselm Kiefer, ‘Jason and the Argonauts’, 1990.
³ Marlene Dumas, ‘Chlorosis’, 1994; ‘Hungry Ghosts’ (group show), 1998.
⁴ ‘Irish Exhibition of Living Art’, 1978, 1980, 1981, 1984.
⁵ Anselm Kiefer, solo exhibition, 1990.
⁶ Bill Viola, solo exhibition, 1989.
⁷ Cecily Brennan, solo exhibition,1991.
⁸ Jimmie Durham, solo exhibition, 1994.
⁹ Tibetan Buddhist monks, ‘Kalachakra Sand Mandala’, 1994.
¹⁰ Patrick Hall, ‘Mountain’, 1995.
¹¹ Miroslaw Balka, ‘Dig Dug Dug’, 2002-03
¹² Koo Jeong-A, ‘The Land of Ousss’, 2002.
¹³ Mike Nelson ‘Tourist Hotel’, 1999.
¹⁴ Cathy Wilkes, solo exhibition, 2004.
¹⁵ Harry Clarke, ‘Retrospective’, 1979.

Image Credits
Tibetan Buddhist monks, ‘Kalachakra Sand Mandala’, 1994; image courtesy of the Douglas Hyde Gallery.
Alice Maher ‘Familiar’, 1994; image courtesy of the Douglas Hyde Gallery.
Gerard Byrne ‘Herald or Press’, 2002; image courtesy of the Douglas Hyde Gallery.
Kathy Prendergast, solo exhibition, 1996; image courtesy of the Douglas Hyde Gallery.
Cathy Wilkes, solo exhibition, 2004; image courtesy of the Douglas Hyde Gallery.
Sam Keogh ‘Four Fold’, 2015; image courtesy of the Douglas Hyde Gallery.

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DECLAN LONG PRESENTS AN OVERVIEW OF THE KERLIN GALLERY’S 30-YEAR HISTORY.

“Places you can go for free, run by strange people with visions who want to help artists by showing and selling their work”: this was Jerry Saltz, the New York art world’s notorious, necessary gadfly, writing in praise of Chelsea galleries right after Hurricane Sandy had flooded basements, damaged exhibition spaces and indiscriminately destroyed countless works of art. Galleries come and go; we might love them or loathe them; but in that moment of devastation, Saltz felt a need to make a stirring case for their defence: fundamentally, he said, “I love them. All. More than ever.”

Free places, strange people: these seem, in general, like good things. In Dublin, right now, there are quite a few versions of this special combination. There are venturesome, commendably crazy people with an against-the-odds enthusiasm for finding and showing art they love, working long-term with artists they admire. And there are places, sometimes a little out of the way, just off our habitual routes, that, on the best days, offer free entry to new worlds. The Kerlin gallery, this year celebrating three decades in Dublin, is one such place. And it’s run by people who might be glad (I hope) to be called strange: motivated by out-of-the-ordinary commitment to art that pushes limits, prompts new thoughts, offers surprising pleasures, gets under our skin or takes us somewhere we’ve never been.

The pre-history of the current Kerlin occurred in Belfast: it was there that gallery founders John Kennedy and David Fitzgerald met and forged a partnership in the 1980s. But the Kerlin consolidated itself after a move to Dublin in 1988, opening its first space on Dawson Street. The first show in that location was, by current standards, relatively conservative: paintings by Clement McAleer. But McAleer’s rigorous and restless landscapes nonetheless established a questioning, questing spirit, with regard to the representation of place, in Ireland and elsewhere, that would be a vital aspect of the Kerlin’s continuing programme. Other early shows in Dublin included some by artists – who would maintain ongoing relationships with the gallery – whose work engaged intelligently and inventively with the depiction of cherished, contested or corrupted places: Stephen McKenna, Elizabeth Magill, Barrie Cooke. Like it or not, this was a subject that resonated under the inevitable, oppressive influence of the Troubles in the north – a formative, regressive political context for the gallery’s progressive cultural disposition – even if these artists didn’t necessarily engage that topic head-on. Other artists who came a little later to the Kerlin, such as Willie Doherty and Paul Seawright, most certainly did – in ways that had profound influence well beyond this island.   

Even in the early stages of the Dublin gallery’s schedule, there were exhibitions by numerous artists who became pivotal to key trajectories of Irish art (though not all, of course, were Irish) and who had, moreover, established significant presences outside Ireland too: Richard Gorman, Brian Maguire, Dorothy Cross, David Godbold and Kathy Prendergast. The opening of a new space in 1994 added further substance and style to the gallery’s profile, raising the levels of its reputation and expanding its capacity for display. Designed by the British architect John Pawson – a demanding minimalist who once created a monastery that the monks found ‘too austere’ – the resulting Anne’s Lane Gallery is an undeniable architectural gem: one of the most perfectly realised places for the presentation of art in Ireland. Among the first shows in the new Anne’s Lane Gallery were some by artists who would be central figures in the gallery’s roster for years to come: Sean Scully, Willie Doherty, Mark Francis and William McKeown.

Listing is inevitable when recounting the contents of an incredible thirty-year programme such as the Kerlin’s – and unavoidably, as with all lists, some things will get left out. History, as Arnold Toynbee said, is one damn thing after another, and the Kerlin has done a lot of damn things, some of them pretty damn remarkable. During the 1990s, a series of guest shows by invited non-gallery artists brought the work of major international figures to Dublin, mostly for the first time. How I wish I’d been in Dublin in 1991 to see exhibitions at the Dawson Street Gallery by German painters A.R. Penck, Martin Kippenberger and Albert Oehlen – the latter pair showing together in a legendary two-hander called ‘Days in Dub’. (Recently the New York gallerist Casey Kaplan Instagrammed a shot of a promotional poster for the show that’s still on the wall of a New York restaurant; the poster is also in the Tate collection.) The list, looking back through the 1990s programme, is quite something: Richard Hamilton, Francesco Clemente / Mimmo Paladino, Hiroshi Sugimoto and Andy Warhol (twice). At times, there have been great group shows too: I remember ‘Architecture Schmarchitecture’ (2003) as my (belated) introduction to the work of Isa Genzken, and a confirmation of my interest in, or enthusiasm for, Liam Gillick, Roger Hjorns, Jim Lambie, Sarah Morris and Thomas Scheibitz. Later there was ‘Less is more – more could be less’ (2007), a collaboration with Produzentengalerie, Hamburg, that featured, among others, Günther Förg, Thomas Schütte, Norbert Schwontkowski, Nicole Wermers and Thomas Scheibitz (again). In each case, as a pretty clueless fledgling critic, I found such shows both grounding and enabling – offering up-close encounters with exciting new work and creating fresh connections to traditions and tendencies of contemporary art outside Ireland.

Over the years, many more meaningful contributions have been made. Darragh Hogan joined Kennedy and Fitzgerald as a director in 2001. Lots of other personnel – including the current Dublin team of Brid McCarthy, Elly Collins, Rosa Abbott and Lee Welch – have played essential parts. The artist list has changed; some have come and gone, while many have maintained valued lasting relationships. Today the group of gallery artists includes – in addition to anyone mentioned thus far – a mix of longstanding and relatively new members: Philip Allen, Gerard Byrne, Aleana Egan, Maureen Gallace, Mark Garry, Liam Gillick, Guggi, Siobhan Hapaska, Calum Innes, Jaki Irvine, Merlin James, Sam Keogh, Samuel Lawrence Cunnane, Eoin McHugh, Isabel Nolan, Jan Pleitner, Daniel Rios Rodriguez, Liliane Tomasko, Paul Winstanley and Zhou Li.

In celebrating thirty years in Dublin, the Kerlin team has decided to plan something appropriate: that is, continuing to do what they’ve always done. Nostalgia is not their style. (This might, in part, be a Belfast thing, borne out of need to break free from the burdensome weight of history.) The next show is always the most important one. And so, the 2018 programme is a series of exhibitions that continues, determinedly, to represent the best of what they do. Gerard Byrne’s ‘In Our Time’ at the start of the year was the Dublin premier of an outstanding video installation by one of the most acclaimed artists working with lens-based media today. Sam Keogh’s ‘Kapton Cadaverine’ was a useful platform for a young artist to advance his idiosyncratic style of sci-fi-inspired lecture-performance. A group show of striking new works by Dorothy Cross, Aleana Egan, Siobhán Hapaska, Isabel Nolan and Kathy Prendergast was an exceptional showcase of imaginatively far-out sculptural practices. Painting exhibitions by, respectively, German and US-based artists Jan Pleitner and Daniel Rios Rodriguez, highlighted new paths being followed in that medium.

Another group show, ‘Face to Face’, staged in collaboration with the De Pont Museum, Tilburg, was the latest in the gallery’s occasional gatherings of notable international figures: in this case Ai Weiwei, Fiona Banner, Dirk Braeckman, Berlinde De Bruyckere, Marlene Dumas, Roni Horn, Giuseppe Penone, Thomas Schütte, Fiona Tan, Luc Tuymans, Jeff Wall and Cathy Wilkes. This, by any measure, is an impressive line-up. Current and upcoming shows (Sean Scully and Liam Gillick) continue to press on at the highest standard. Like most serious galleries today, there is constant pressure to have a presence everywhere: participating in art fairs, working with international museums, seeing and showing new work all over the world. Nonetheless, as the Kerlin reaches the landmark stage of thirty years in Dublin, it makes sense to remember how much they have made a difference right here.

Declan Long is a critic and lecturer in modern and contemporary art at NCAD, where he is Co-Director of the MA Art in the Contemporary World.

Image Credits
Martin Kippenberger and Wendy Judge after the opening of ‘Day in Dub’, an exhibition by Martin Kippenberger & Albert Oehlen, Kerlin Gallery, August 1991; photograph by Orla O’Brien.
Willie Doherty, Dreams of Renewal, Dreams of Annihilation, 2017, triptych, framed pigment prints mounted on Dibond, edition of 3; image courtesy the artist & Kerlin Gallery.
Dorothy Cross, Buoy, 2014, blue shark skin, white gold leaf, antique easel, Italian alabaster; image courtesy the artist & Kerlin Gallery.
‘Face to Face’ (29 June – 18 August 2018), curated by Hendrik Driessen. All works collection of De Pont Museum, Tilburg. Installation view (L-R): Berlinde De Bruyckere, Het hart uitgerukt, 1997–1998, India ink on paper; Thomas Schütte, Untitled (United Enemies), 1994, modelling clay, fabric, wood, rope, PVC pipe and glass dome; image courtesy Kerlin Gallery.

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JANE MORROW REFLECTS 25-YEARS OF THE UNIVERSITY OF ATYPICAL, BELFAST.

Most organisations would throw a big, indulgent party for their 25th birthday. It’s not that the former Arts & Disability Forum don’t love a party – they do – but they elected instead to mark this key anniversary by asking difficult questions of their staff, board, members and stakeholders: “Who are we? What contribution do we make? Why are we here and how can we continue to make the best work possible happen here?” As a result, they took the bold move of rebranding. They’d known for a while that the organisation’s name made it sound more like a “therapeutic talking shop” – warm and friendly, but hardly the empowering and challenging organisation that their programming declares them to be. I spoke to the two fierce women spearheading these changes – Chief Executive Officer, Chris Ledger, and Arts Development Officer, Paula Larkin – about the organisation’s mission and context.

Formed in 1993 by a group of disabled and deaf people who wanted to be involved in the arts, the Arts & Disability Forum changed the game. Placing disabled and deaf artists at the centre of their activities, they set about changing attitudes regarding access to the arts in Northern Ireland. This governance model is enshrined in their constitution; only recently have applications for board membership been accepted from individuals who do not present as disabled or deaf. Through the years, five major strands of their operations developed: a gallery with an outreach/lifelong learning programme; The annual Bounce festival; the Arts & Disability Equality Charter (ADEC), which they author and disseminate via training; and the Individual Disabled Artist (iDA) Awards scheme – their biggest success, in terms of supporting the critical and professional development of artists across disciplines.

Rebranding the organisation required open conversations about language: how to communicate a person-centred approach, in line with the social model of disability and how to address accepted and inappropriate terminologies? In addition to prioritising the growth and professional development of their artist members, their remit is to educate the public. ‘University’ reflects a whole society; a coming together. From this critical mass, a position of strength is achieved by a community who don’t necessarily feel fully understood or recognised all of the time. Similarly, the term ‘Atypical’ enables members of this community the freedom to identify in ways that they are comfortable with. It acknowledges a spectrum of lived experiences, without the prescription of labels (that invariably serve to differentiate, rather than unify). University of Atypical advocates the use of the term ‘disabled people’, placing the emphasis on exclusionary systems in our society.¹

The University of Atypical is primarily an arts organisation for which it is just as important to have a disability culture. The practitioners they work with autonomously make the choice whether to foreground disability or not. As intersectional frameworks have gained traction over the last 30 years, artists have been paramount in shaping a new set of values which address individual and collective experiences of disability, race, gender, sexuality, age, class and size, amongst others.

Chris identifies meaningful collaborations for the organisation based on the ‘Crips and Queers’ principle.² She describes performance artist and LGBTQIA icon David Hoyle, (involved in the first Bounce festival, which coincided with London’s Paralympics in 2012), who used the performance to ‘come out’ with mental ill-health. This dark but gently humorous anecdote exemplifies the ethos of Atypical, an organisation which considers itself to be on the cheekier side of things, encouraging audiences to laugh along with them, whilst challenging their own preconceptions. Meanwhile, what Chris refers to as a “cruel revolution” has taken place. A decade of austerity has emboldened our blame culture, foregrounding unprecedented levels of scrutiny and the political withdrawal of public funding, threatening disabled and deaf artists as well as arts organisations receiving subsidy.

Chris tells me that some perceive University of Atypical’s work as therapeutic, which couldn’t be further from the organisation’s objectives. However, there are undisputed wellbeing outcomes from their work. Chris and Paula tell me about  exciting plans to expand their artist-led public programme. They’re committed to paying artists, but also recognise the benefits for artists to act in a voluntary capacity – making decisions as board members for example, or identifying and approaching venues that require support to change their access policies. I’m assured that it is a stretch for most organisations to achieve genuine inclusion – measured through the ADEC framework that Atypical manages – but venues are guided regarding best practice.

The Atypical Gallery hosts between six and eight exhibitions per year. Paula’s recent exhibition highlights include: Olivier Fermariello’s 2017 exhibition ‘Je t’aime moi aussi’ (photographic works on the apparent taboo of sex and disability); and Maurice Hobson’s posthumous ‘Faces Caught in Time’, “a deliberate and uncomfortable reminder of the human casualties of ideological violence”. This impactful display has brought Hobson’s work back into the public eye and potentially into notable collections. Paula also outlines the strength of the relationships that they’ve developed with emerging practitioners, such as video artist Mark McKeown.

Chris’s selection features more performative and participatory works, such as Noemi Lakmaier’s weebles dinner party, ‘We Them Other’. Funding from Good Relations enabled the organisation to employ artists to work with politicians in Stormont and the wider public, to make Japanese paper cranes, marking the anniversary of the Nagasaki and Hiroshima bombings. The current exhibition ‘She Stepped Out and I Stepped in Again’ features five female artists who collectively made performances whilst “weaving fluidly through each other’s steps and spaces”.

Paula admits that public expectations may be low, regarding the work they support and produce. Following hugely successful renovations of the gallery space in early 2018, she now wants more and better, and refuses to compromise on offering invited practitioners a professional and prestigious space. I pity the fool who apparently once mentioned “therapeutic watercolours” to these women! They laugh as they tell me that the skilled and dedicated team (including Leo Devlin, Hugh O’Donnell and Caroline Shiels, who have given many years to the organisation) have been likened to terriers, as opposed to bulldogs, because they like to play as well. The very flat hierarchy in Atypical enables them to “just make things happen”, expanding their environment to fit them, not the other way around.

For more information visit: universityofatypical.org

Jane Morrow is an independent curator and PhD researcher at the University of Ulster, with a specific interest in artist and organisational development.

Notes
¹ There are 13.9 million disabled people in the UK, constituted by 8% of children, 19% of working-age adults and 45% of pension-age adults. See: scope.org.uk/media/disability-facts-figures
² ‘Crip’ is considered to be an inclusive term, representing all disabilities, including people with vastly divergent physical and psychological differences. As an ‘insider’ term for disability culture, ‘crip’ is associated with the contemporary disability rights movement, in the same way that ‘queer’ has been elevated from a derogatory term by the gay community, to an umbrella term, referring to all LGBTQI people. See: wright.edu/event/sex-disability-conference/crip-theory

Image Credits
Maurice Hobson, photograph from ‘Faces Caught In Time’; photograph by Simon Mills, courtesy of University of Atypical.
Claire Cunningham, Give Me a Reason to Live, Bounce festival 2017; photograph by Paul Moore, courtesy of University of Atypical.

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PÁDRAIC E. MOORE INTERVIEWS OONAGH YOUNG ABOUT THE TEN-YEAR EVOLUTION OF HER DUBLIN GALLERY.

Pádraic E. Moore: We first met in 2006, at which point you already had an established design practice. Can you can give some insights into what made you want to open a gallery?

Oonagh Young: I’d always been drawn to visual art and studied visual communication before setting up a graphic design studio. I had to consider expanding during the ‘boom’, but realised I would become a manager, which made me question the direction I was taking. Working as a designer with several arts organisations at the time, gave me insights into how these organisations operated and a desire to learn more. Returning to education, I did an MA in Anglo Irish Literature and Drama, followed by an MA in Visual Arts Practice at IADT. Rather than starting from scratch, I decided to combine both strands of my practice, establishing the gallery, while continuing to work as a graphic designer from the same space.

PEM: Was there always an aspiration to have premises?

OY: Yes. When I graduated in 2007, I felt there was a lack of quality venues, particularly for emerging artists. I thought that if I invested in a space, I could create an environment where artists would enjoy exhibiting their work. I wanted to attract good artists, in order to develop a quality programme, so by providing a gallery where walls and lighting had been considered a priority, the space itself became a sufficiently neutral vessel for each artist to make it their own.

PEM: The interior you developed with A2 Architects is utilitarian and very much a white cube environment. This adaptability and versatility seem central to your programme.

OY: I’ve always been eager to activate the venue by including other art forms, such as: ANÚ Theatre who staged part of ‘Vardo’ from The Monto Cycle in the gallery; readings from J.G. Ballard formed part of ‘Timecoloured Place’, as the gallery received the rights to re-publish his first short story; ‘Less + More’ featured John Rainey and Fiona Mulholland as part of Year of Design 2015 and included A2 Architects, who created an alternative to a plinth for viewing sculptural works in the gallery. This exhibition led to a book, entitled Transdisciplinary Practice, which I edited with Linda King.

PEM:  Are there any exhibitions that were particularly pivotal to the history and evolution of the gallery?

OY: They are all important! One of the earliest was ‘Yellow,’ a durational performance by Amanda Coogan that took place in 2008 before she was represented by Kevin Kavanagh. In 2012, she also presented ‘Molly Blooms’, referencing the scales of justice statue on the top of Dublin Castle, who has her back to the city.

The exhibition, ‘Blasphemy’ (2010) was co-curated with Mary Cremin in response to the blasphemy laws still existing in the Irish constitution – an issue that we voted on during the recent presidential election. The exhibition included work by artists such as David Godbold and Nevan Lahart and featured a screening of the film Rocky Road to Dublin, directed by Peter Lennon. I recall that Lennon could not attend but sent a letter that I read at the screening, which was really special. That exhibition later toured to The Dock in Carrick-on-Shannon.

‘TimecolouredPlace’ (2011) included commissioned works made by economicthoughtprojects (ETP) and Henderson Six, with poetry by Patrick Chapman. Other significant artists who have shown in the gallery include: Alan Phelan, Caoimhe Kilfeather, Amy Stephens, Vittorio Santoro, Dennis McNulty, David Beattie (who also curated ‘Tool Use’), Dominic Hawgood (PhotoIreland Festival), Ursula Burke, Tamsin Snow and Sarah Tynan, to name a few.

More recently, the ‘Treeline Project’ (also co-curated with Mary Cremin and funded by the Arts Council’s ‘Making Great Art’ award), anchored the gallery more firmly in the locality by proposing: a tree-planting project for the street; projecting the entire book of Joyce’s Ulysses on a loop; and building a pavilion (designed by Donal Colfer Architects) in Liberty Park, which was activated through a series of artistic projects and events. This project aimed to highlight cultural aspects of Dublin’s north city centre (Monto) and to alter a generally accepted and often very negative narrative attributed to the area.

PEM: This was one of several projects that you initiated to foster connections with local communities. Can you discuss other examples?

OY: Local children have always been curious about the gallery and I got to know some of them a little bit over time. It came to my attention that these kids were quite excluded, so to create awareness that this is their territory, I developed a project that materialised into a comic entitled BUZZ. The process entailed me meeting with several children in a local school and recording their insights on day-to-day life. I then commissioned two illustrators to depict the stories directly from the audio files. This meant the children were anonymous, which gave them the freedom to tell their stories; to say whatever they wished. I held an exhibition of the children’s own work of city centre landmarks in the gallery to officially launch the comic and I feel this had a significant impact upon how the gallery was perceived. Because a lot of the children live around here, they now have a connection to the space.

Being a member of The Monto Arts group has been very important. Working closely with Sheena Barrett in The Lab, Helen Carey of Fire Station Artists’ Studios and Talbot Studios means there is a local support structure which is vital when running a space alone. We recently did a project called ‘Print n Run’ in the gallery this summer, as part of the Crinniú na nÓg festival, whereby artist Katherine Maguire facilitated the gathering of slogans from local children who were invited to screen-print their favourite statements onto T-shirts.

PEM: Let’s discuss your curatorial strategy. I’m sensing that your methodology is quite intuitive?

OY: I have approximately six shows a year and am generally on the lookout for interesting recent graduates or unrepresented mid-career artists who may have new work they want to explore or who have not shown for a long time. Obviously, there is a desire for artists to make new work and this provides a context and incentive in which to do this. I don’t strive to fill the space constantly, as I continue to work as a designer in order to fund the gallery. This means that there is space in the schedule to include other art forms and I would like to think that people can be surprised by what takes place in the gallery.

PEM: Would you say that the two strands of your work influence one another and if so, how does this manifest?

OY: Absolutely; it is a symbiotic relationship. I’ve had the pleasure of working as a designer on many artists books and working with all the major art institutions in Dublin. This has helped me make many connections which have assisted in the programming and promotion of the artists I have shown in the gallery.  On a more direct level, correlations can be made between blank walls and blank pages, where some sense of cohesion and/or continuity is required in an overall approach and layout. Ultimately when it comes to an exhibition or a book, it’s crucial to think about the whole picture. While a book can never replace the presence of an artwork, my aim as a designer is to reflect the essence of an artists’ practice in print form.

PEM: What’s next for the gallery?

OY: I am in the process of assembling a comprehensive website that will function as an archive and provide an overview of the diversity of projects. I’m looking forward to solo shows by Colin Crotty (17 October – 16 November) and Brian Fay (22 November – 22 December) before the end of the year.

Pádraic E. Moore is a writer, curator and art historian currently based in Brussels and Dublin.
padraicmoore.com

Oonagh Young is a Curator/Director of Oonagh Young Gallery and Graphic Designer/Director of Design HQ.
oonaghyoung.com

Image Credits
Ursula Burke, ‘Vestige’, 2016; L–R:  Fallen Tiger, Parian Porcelain ‘Busts’ and The Brazen Head; photograph by Oonagh Young; all images courtesy of Oonagh Young Gallery.
Dominic Hawgood, ‘Under the Influence’, detail of Reconstruction of “The Anointing Water 1.0”; photograph by Dominic Hawgood.
The Circe Pavilion in Liberty Park, Dublin 1, part of the ‘Treeline Project’, 2017, curated by Oonagh Young and Mary Cremin and designed by Donal Colfer Architects; photograph by Ste Murray.
Amy Stevens, ‘Restless Nature’, 2011; L–R: Strategic Calm, Shifting Ground and Riding the Fault Line; photograph by Denis Mortell.

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SARA GREAVU INTERVIEWS HELEN CAMMOCK ABOUT HER NEW FILM COMMISSION FOR VOID GALLERY, DERRY.

This year marks the 50th anniversary of a key civil rights march in Derry that took place on 5 October 1968, calling for the right to vote and an end to gerrymandering and discrimination in housing. This march, and its suppression by the state, is often cited as the galvanising moment of the civil rights movement, and as the starting point of the political conflict that dominated the next 30 years. In the days and weeks before the 50th anniversary, a range of events were organised by a wide spectrum of political groups and by a number of local cultural institutions. These included talks, screenings, exhibitions, rallies and two separate commemorative marches. On the anniversary itself, Helen Cammock’s exhibition, ‘The Long Note’, opened in Void Gallery, featuring a newly commissioned video work, The Long Note, centring on the role of women in the civil rights movement. This is shown alongside Cammock’s video and text-based print series, Shouting in Whispers (2017) and a reading area comprising a range of research material.

Combining interviews, archival footage, text, video, song and voiceover, The Long Note strikes a reflective tone, moving beyond a straight re-insertion of women into the historical narrative, touching lightly on issues of gendered historiography, the mechanisms of erasure, and the fallibility of collective memory. A mix of archive and new interviews (with known and less-known figures from the period) conveys both vigorous personal mythmaking and nuanced discussions of the different, often collaborative, ways that women organised – and the invisible reproductive labour of resistance and revolution. In the months leading up to the 1968 commemorations, Bernadette Devlin McAliskey – a significant representative of the civil rights era who is threaded through the layered narrative of The Long Note –  commented that “… those claiming bragging rights from 1968 might reflect with greater humility on the price paid against the degree of progress made since that first march and examine their actual contribution to the reality of 2018”.¹ When we look back to this lost moment of revolutionary potential, projects like The Long Note can point to some of the mistakes, oversights and invisibilities that led to the failures of the present – but perhaps they can also signpost us to their redress. I interviewed Helen on 5 October to discuss some of these ideas.

Sara Greavu: What did you bring with you into this project from previous work, in terms of methods or approach?

Helen Cammock: I guess the beginning was the conversation that I had with Mary Cremin [Director of Void Gallery]. Generally, I work on research or ideas that come from my experience or things that I’ve been affected by. So, in a way, this is not a film I would ever have made, unless somebody had approached me, because I would feel that, potentially, it wasn’t my place to do it. I couldn’t make it in the same way that I’d made other films, because I wasn’t talking about my own experience and I wasn’t talking generationally about experiences of people with whom I share a heritage. I had to take myself out of it much more than I have done in any other film I’ve ever made.

SG: Many of the women you interview are drawing on equivalencies and solidarities with the Black British experience. Was this something you were expecting to find so strongly represented?

HC: Absolutely, yes. My dad was born in Cuba, coming from a Jamaican family. He came to the UK in the Second World War and he understood what oppression meant. He was eight when he left Cuba but the experience of coming to Britain was completely traumatic for him, so as a family, we understood those things. When we watched ‘The Troubles’ on the news in the 70s and 80s, we made the connections between the Black civil rights movement, including what was happening in South Africa, for instance. So, although I was thinking, “Oh it’s not my context,” I knew that here was a connectedness that I already felt from these early experiences. And then it was about research and meeting people; once you have dialogue, you’re into something then.

SG: I’m interested in the way you use the archive in both works, in different ways. Can you talk a bit about that?

HC: Prior to Shouting in Whispers, I think I’d only used archival footage once before. I made this film as a kind of imagined conversation with James Baldwin using an archive clip and I just felt like it made complete sense, because everything I do with scripting is all about a collage and montage of stories. So, there’s this idea that histories are never singular, they’re always multiple; but there’s always a hierarchy of how they knit together and that’s the thing that I want to interrupt, disrupt and reshape. It made sense, then, to start doing that visually, as well as in terms of the way that language works. The relationships between language, image and text are really important in everything I do.

When I made Shouting in Whispers, that was the moment I realised that, actually, I could make new stories with archival footage. So sometimes, for instance, the audio on the archival footage belongs to another piece of footage, so the stories are just moving and weaving together with each other. This works with the various registers and treatments given to different contributions. I used footage from hegemonic news sources and then I was also using the archive we managed to get from [local filmmaker] Vinny Cunningham, which has footage from people’s 16mm and 8mm cameras. Some of it is really blurry and it’s been cut together in a kind of amateur way. I think it’s really important that we get these two views: some with reporters standing there and other footage that’s kind of shonky and clumsily cut together – for me that’s beautiful.

SG: Do you feel there’s a particular ethics of working with film made by people in the community? Do you feel a responsibility to honour that material in a different way?

HC: The ethics are always tricky and if I thought about it too much, I would come a bit unstuck. When you can talk to people face to face, there’s dialogue and it’s so much easier, because you can ask people what they’re comfortable with. You can get a sense of what might make them vulnerable or not, and then you can make decisions. There have been many occasions when I’ve really wanted to use an image or some video footage and I know I can’t. But when you make use of an archive like this, sometimes the material isn’t tagged to a name and there’s no way to contact its maker. So, I had just had to take that footage and work with it in the same way that I would with a published text. Again, if I think about that too much, it can be really problematic. I have to just check myself all the time – “What am I saying with this footage? How and why am I saying it? Who is going to be watching this and how will they read it?” It’s not a historical document or a political document, but of course, it is founded in history and in politics. I bring my own politics with me, so I knew very clearly where I was sitting, whilst making this film.

SG: I’m also interested in your use of music. I know you have used the lament as a format in previous projects and music is threaded through this work as well.

HC: The work is very layered and there are a number of different registers of text and the voice. For me, music is another way of expressing what I want to say, but I know that people receive things in different ways. For instance, I used a short extract from a Langston Hughes poem. I know that if I read that with my very English accent, it would be received in a completely different way than if I sing it. The weight of conveying language and emotion is completely different when you shift registers like that. I’m interested in the role of music in sadness but also in resistance, in work songs and political songs. I guess in many ways, laments are also political songs. In Ireland it seems the same as in the Caribbean, and in the black communities in the States: song is a used for survival, as much as it is a tool for politics, as a way of making cross-cultural, cross-racial, cross-gender connections. Music is really important in the way that I think of the world – it’s there as part of storytelling.

Helen Cammock was the winner of the Max Mara Art Prize for Women (2018–19) and will have a solo exhibition at Whitechapel Gallery (2019). Sara Greavu works with artists and others to make exhibitions, projects and texts. She is based in Derry. ‘The Long Note’ continues at Void Gallery, Derry until 15 December.

Notes
¹ ‘PLATFORM: Bernadette McAliskey’, The Irish News, 9 February 2018. https://www.irishnews.com/news/2018/02/09/news/platform-bernadette-mcaliskey-1252271

Image Credits
Helen Cammock, The Long Note, 2018, single channel, 103 mins, video still; all images courtesy of the artist and Void Gallery.

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CCA Derry~Londonderry
11 August – 12 October 2018

‘Lavish and Judicious’ is a multivalent and complex exhibition, presented across the three gallery spaces at CCA and featuring work by four female artists: Aideen Doran, Jaana Kokko, Jennifer Trouton and Caroline Achaintre. There are essentially six artworks in the exhibition, including a single-channel film installation and sound installation. According to the exhibition statement, these works speak to “the overlaps between the historical, the ethnological, landscape and colonialism” and how these forces can be “mapped to contemporary systems of production”.

The exhibition’s starting point is Sion Mills, a model village and linen mill in County Tyrone, established by the Herdman family in 1835 to provide employment and housing for factory workers and their families. The title originates from Mr and Mrs Samuel Hall’s 1845 travelogue, in which they praise the Herdmans for their dedication to their workforce and the way they “distribut[e] motives to improvement, lavishly and judiciously”. As part of the new ‘CCA Editions’ series, and to coincide with the exhibition, artist Colin Darke has produced a screenprint on linen entitled Beauty is in the Streets, which takes the concept of the model village at Sion Mills and extends this thematic reference to the Haussmannisation of Paris during the Second French Empire (1852–1870). ‘Lavish and Judicious’ coincides with the Linen Biennale Northern Ireland 2018, resonating perfectly with the themes of past, present and future labour landscapes.

The centrepiece of the exhibition is a newly-commissioned sound work by Aideen Doran, entitled Woman Sitting at the Machine, Thinking (2018). Encircled with a black curtain and a blue light visible within, the installation immediately entices the viewer, upon entering the gallery. The artwork is based on Karen Brodine’s poem of the same name, ingeniously referencing the past and the present, through the distillation, overlap and chorus of female voices: “Her face shining back from the silver case, her fingers sharp tacks calling up the digits… When she typeset for Safeway, dipping her hands in processor chemicals, her hands burned and peeled, and her chest ached from the fumes… so our labour gathers… then they spit the body out the door at 65”. The installation is distinctive, inherently sensory and inviting. The lighting is conducive to rest and reflection, and visitors can listen to the voices by lying down on an elevated stage, which is covered in a soft blue fabric.

Jaana Kokko’s nuanced and absorbing single-channel film, What There Is to See (2017), looks at landscape through a range of historical and ideological lenses – including romanticism, nationalism and colonialism – inviting us to consider their impact on our relationship with nature and the world around us. The actors are from the Theatre of Visually Impaired in Helsinki. With the script composed as a series of tableaux arrangements, the actors reposition themselves and take turns to speak: “… we were supposed to perform that text by Brunhoff, the social utopia of Babar the Elephant… That book does have a mild nuance of Western cultural imperialism… A mild one? It’s colonialist through and through… they have a barter economy… I quite like the Marxist concept here…”.

Two exquisite realist paintings by Jennifer Trouton feature in Gallery 3 – Ariadne’s Thread (2013) and Longue Durée (2014). In the latter, Trouton juxtaposes red-and-white-patterned drapery against green and gold wallpaper, mirroring the compositional style of Dutch interior painting. The artist has subverted the iconography featured in the wallpaper. This particular toile illustrates foxhunting, to which Trouton has added images of Irish women and children working on the land. Having researched this painting, I am aware that the fabric in the foreground is a hand-stitched colonial blanket, brought back to Ireland from America in the early 1900s by Trouton’s great grandmother. In the painting, this functional blanket acts as a counterpoint to the luxurious wallpaper, tying in with the oxymoronic sentiment of the exhibition’s title.

In my view, it would have been beneficial if such contextual information (about Trouton’s paintings and other artworks) could have been provided, however I’m aware that CCA adheres to a pared-down curatorial approach. Equally, Caroline Achaintre’s work Rudder (2018) is somewhat of an anomaly, as a textile work in isolation. The gallery text highlights the artist’s novel approach to creating handmade textiles, which includes deliberate mistakes and a rough finish. It would have been interesting to see another example of Achaintre’s practice, to augment her presence. However, overall, I found the exhibition compelling and the theme novel; it offered a space for reflection on another era, through a series of contemporary lenses.

Marianne O’Kane Boal is a writer on art and architecture and a member of AICA.

Image Credits
Jaana Kokko, What There Is To See, 2017, single channel, 24 mins; photograph by Simon Mills, courtesy of CCA.
Left to right: Caroline Achaintre, Rudder, 2018, tufted wool; Jennifer Trouton, Longue Durée, 2014, oil on linen; photograph by Simon Mills, courtesy of CCA.

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The MAC, Belfast
10 August – 21 October 2018

So often, when artists reach a certain level of recognition, when the money rolls in and they are showered with very large budgets to play with, their integrity melts into air. They find themselves driven by the market, their hard-fought methods and concepts diluted by the establishment that supports them. Happily, Phil Collins is a rare exception to this rule and this show at the MAC provides evidence of his continued growth over the years.

The centrepiece of ‘This is the Day’ is the hour-long film, Ceremony (2017), commemorating the Russian Revolution. It tells the story of Collins’ relocation of a decommissioned public statue of Friedrich Engels from a Ukrainian village to Manchester, the revolutionary’s home for twenty years. The film includes passages from Engels’s classic 1845 book, The Condition of the Working Class in England, read by the actor Maxine Peake. Another familiar actor, Carla Henry, makes an impassioned commentary on contemporary class struggles.

The film has numerous narratives interwoven throughout. Engels’s legacy is explored by Ukranian school children, while the “communist” past is recalled by people old enough to remember. We follow the statue’s journey through Europe and its arrival in Manchester. The film is interspliced with found footage of Lenin during the Revolution and of his statue being felled during the collapse of the Stalinist bloc from 1989 onwards.

A number of stories are enacted: a young woman discusses with her friend her desire to be a dancer; factory workers talk about the realities of their lives (in their roles as the grave-diggers of capitalism); a Jobseeker’s Allowance claimant is advised on uncovering the system’s mysteries; volunteers display the iniquities of food banks; a homeless single mother receives help from an advisor; and, most movingly, a frustrated school student is encouraged by her lovely father to continue with her studies.

These are soap opera scenes, located in the real world of oppression and struggle, unified at the end of the film as the statue of Engels passes by on the back of a lorry. Its arrival is celebrated in the ceremony of the film’s title. The festival atmosphere is a beautiful and moving instance of working-class solidarity, with crowds engaging in serious political discussions and speeches, while enjoying the silliness of, for example, instructions on successful shoplifting while wearing false Engels beards.

The meaning of style (2011) is a short film of less than five minutes, in which Collins worked with anti-fascist skinheads in Malaysia. Adopting the style of British skinheads of the sixties and seventies – Ben Shermans, braces, DMs and of course shaved heads (while the one young woman who appears has a feather-cut). They act out their roles accordingly, swaggering, smoking and fighting, which, despite the kicking, is more playful than violent (think of the lower-rank T-Birds in Grease). There is a sense of cool companionship and the underlying gentility is enhanced when a box of butterflies is released. The insects rest undisturbed on bodies, heads and faces as the young men sit oblivious, reading copies of 1970s publications, including Radio Times and Melody Maker – engaging with the past era from which their style originates.

Delete Beach (2016) is a collaboration with the Japanese anime studios, STUDIO4°C. Set in an ostensibly utopian future in which carbon-based energy has been outlawed, a resistance group (calling themselves Burners, but referred to as Lemmings) rebels against a still-oppressive capitalist system. Their rebellion, under the slogan “Terror is apathy/Apathy terror/Blood for Oil/Poetry is Resistance”, centres around a new bond with oil – smoking it, injecting it and finally committing suicide in order to become it, after a million years has passed. The film is shown in an installation that echoes its content, but adds little. The audience sits on oil barrels on a makeshift beach, the imagery reflected in a pool below the screen.

This is one of those rare moments when an exhibition stimulates critical thought and emotional engagement, well beyond the gallery encounter. Ceremony genuinely made me cry a little and inspired me to reread my Engels.

Colin Darke is an artist, curator and writer based in Belfast.

Image Credits
Phil Collins, Ceremony, 2017, HD video; colour, sound, 60 min; installation view; MAC; photograph Simon Mills; courtesy Shady Lane Productions.
Phil Collins, Delete Beach, 2016, HD video; colour, sound; installation view; MAC; photograph Simon Mills; courtesy Shady Lane Productions.

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Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin
19 September – 17 November 2018

Shot on a Hi8 video camera in Seamus Harahan’s familiar, bare-bones style, the film at the heart of this exhibition is presented as an episodic, fragmented documentary, displayed across an array of antique monitors and makeshift screens. With a miscellany of other objects scattered around the gallery space – an old paperback of Knut Hamsun’s Hunger, an enamelled teapot, a Sleaford Mods record – the ramshackle installation feels a little like a car-boot sale. Fancier notes are provided by a copy of a famous tapestry, which functions as a kind of backdrop and a single Eames aluminium chair.¹ Less fancy chairs stand loitering alone, or in groups, as though waiting for the action to begin. Without a conventional timeline, the film unfolds spatially. As images and sounds come fitfully to life, the visitor is prompted to move around the gallery, catching glimpses of a culture, “too spectral and hidden”, to be examined from only one point of view.²

When I visited the gallery, Irish Traveller and singer, Thomas McCarthy, told me how, after a night of singing and story-telling, Travellers would sometimes wake up to find that the locals had hidden their horses, effectively trapping them so that the entertainment could continue. A co-author and principal subject of this newly commissioned work, McCarthy seems alive to the ironies of a culture that is both valued and disrespected within Irish society. In their different ways, the traditional singer and the filmmaker are already engaged with the documentation of disappearing worlds. Working together, they have fashioned – from their mutual ‘comfort and joy’ – an exhibition that resists the elegiac, in favour of something far more contrary and awkward.

The exhibition’s subtitle suggests the contrary nature of an indigenous culture finding itself ‘other’. The film documents a form of folk music, but the implied universality of that term is also contradicted by how many Traveller songs remain relatively private – singing about events you’re not directly connected to is considered inauthentic, or worse. McCarthy learned many of his songs from his mother, who also encouraged him to develop his distinctive “warble” (or vibrato, for the more classically-minded). The extended notes and pitch variations produced by this technique also influenced the pipers in their family. None of this is directly referred to in the film-footage (which, in another anachronistic move, is actually VHS tape). Instead, we see a series of performances by McCarthy and others, in locations that include: the Willie Clancy Summer School in County Clare; the interior of a windy tent; and an unidentified Dublin squat. Despite the fragmented nature of the overall work, each performance is shown in its entirety. The camera drifts and zooms, but there is little or no editing; the primacy of the captured moment is what counts.

In some of Harahan’s earlier films (not included in this exhibition) – Holylands (2003), for example, or in the ongoing series ‘Cold Open’ – fugitive moments from everyday scenes are overlain with appropriated musical soundtracks. At first, the choice of music can seem incongruous, but the combinations are always brilliantly effective. Harahan tends to shoot unobtrusively, his subjects often unaware they’re being filmed. As a viewer you are drawn into an uneasy alliance with the camera’s clandestine presence. In this new work, the subject is onboard from the start, the music and filming evolving together. The unconventional structure and gallery set-up may be a response to this, with these tensions becoming more formally integrated and more actively experienced by the viewer.

McCarthy also told me how the arrival of battery-powered generators allowed Travellers to watch television at home for the first time. As younger family members sat silently watching the screen, he remembers his father being appalled by this new “conversation killer”. There may be an irony in an oral culture now being extended through the technology that helped cause it to diminish, but Harahan’s choice of largely outmoded recording and display equipment lends the exhibition its own sense of vulnerability. McCarthy’s father – himself a well-known seanachí – might have chuckled to himself, when a nearby screen came spluttering back to life and my chat with his son came to an end. The conversation killer had started up again.

John Graham is an artist who lives in Dublin. He teaches Fine Art at Sligo Institute of Technology.

Notes
¹ The exhibition features a replica of The Unicorn in Captivity (from The Unicorn Tapestries), (1495 – 1505), currently at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
² Seamus Harahan exhibition text.

Image Credits
‘my comfort and my joy: Songs from the Irish Other’, Seamus Harahan and Thomas McCarthy, 2018, installation view, Douglas Hyde Gallery; photographs by Kate O’Brien. 

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Highlanes Gallery, Drogheda
22 September – 3 November 2018

In the Highlanes Gallery, Theresa Nanigian presents a crowd-pleasing show, peppered with many different faces and voices, each expressing individual experience and cumulatively communicating a universal humanity that is a comfort to bask in.

‘Just a bit extraordinary’ is comprised of distinct parts that were previously presented individually in Limerick City Gallery and The LAB, Dublin. Three ‘chapters’ have now coalesced at the Highlanes, encompassing the artist’s exploration of “the expression of identity across the lifespan.” This ‘lifespan’ is predominantly represented through three photographic series: ‘not sorry’ documenting teenager’s unoccupied bedrooms (youth); ‘master of my universe’ featuring vendors on the Venice Beach boardwalk in California (middle age); and ‘trying to behave’, photographs of dancers at a bimonthly tea dance event in Covent Garden (old age). Along with the large-scale photographic portraiture, the exhibition features preexisting objects, text works, an audio piece and a small projected video.

The artist’s methodology was informed by the ‘Twenty Statements Test’ (TST), a self-concept survey created by sociologist Manfred Kuhn, which invites individuals to describe themselves in relation to the prompt: “I am…”. One room within the gallery is dedicated to the presentation of 75 anonymous responses gathered by the artist, displayed as wall texts on individual panels. The exhibition takes its title from one of these responses. Acquiring these self-analysis statements can be viewed as the artist’s primary achievement, as they arguably reveal far more than the posed and edited photographic portraits, in their honesty and raw representation. These survey responses succeed in showing a world made up of inadequacies and fears; they assure the viewer that they are not alone in experiencing these subjective emotions. However, in terms of depth, two images in particular stand out: a territorial boardwalk couple, seemingly only displaying themselves, sitting surrounded by strongly worded signs (warning against unpermitted photography of them or their space); and a large, proud image of coiffed and lipsticked ‘Lindsay’ who is taking a break from dancing. A small, ethereal video, depicting a dancing couple, is projected onto the altar (the venue is a former Franciscan Church), providing a lovely spot-lit moment amid the masses. Elsewhere, an audio work features a seaside ‘freak show’ carnival announcer.

Nanigian has a background in business and, more pertinently here, psychology. She is therefore well-positioned to examine the value in this kind of artmaking, which incorporates qualitative research methods and the display of her subject’s objects and built environments. During a public conversation with Gemma Tipton on 22 September, Nanigian spoke of “elevating” and “paying respect” to the objects she acquired from vendors on Venice Beach that are now on display in the gallery. Objects – such as CD’s, necklaces, decorative chimes, supposed fossils of the earliest sea creatures and vinyl records (painted with images of Marilyn Monroe and David Bowie) – are presented in individual glass-fronted boxes. In an ‘inventory’ list to the side, the maker of each object provides some contextual, and sometimes amusing or profound, information about their lives or the Venice Beach environment, without associating names to the numbered objects.

One assumes that this “elevation” mentioned by Nanigian is achieved through taking these objects from their beachfront market origin and recontextualising them in the gallery. It is important to note that the only ‘objects’ that can be sold along this particular Venice Beach strip are artworks. The inclusion of these uncredited art objects – which had to be thus, due to their maker’s presumed participation in the anonymous survey – prompts a series of questions: How do we value objects and who ascribes this value? Is placement in the gallery or museum the ultimate signifier of import? If so, who says? Perhaps more importantly, how do we value an object’s creator? Which artists are exalted, by whom and why? Who is an artist anyway? These are compelling questions for an exhibiting artist to raise in a show which, alongside its more general exploration of identity, also managed to question a key identity in this context – that of ‘artist’.

Lily Cahill is co-editor of Critical Bastards Magazine based in Dublin.

Image Credits
Theresa Nanigian, ‘Just a bit extraordinary’, installation view, Highlanes Gallery; images courtesy of Highlanes. 

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