The MAC, Belfast
8 December 2023 – 7 April 2024
Curated by Belinda Quirke, Niamh McCann’s solo exhibition ‘someone decides, hawk or dove’ fills all three galleries at the MAC, and includes sculpture, furniture, photography, and montage.
The Sunken Gallery introduces the show (and its narrator, Colin the blind dog) in the video, titled The Hairline Crack (Belfast Edit) (2023), referencing Ciaran Carson’s poem of the same name, looking at uncertainties and absurdities thrown up by ‘The Troubles’. The title of the exhibition is taken from a line in the poem: “Someone decides, hawk or dove. Ambushes are sprung. Velvet fist. Iron Glove.”
Walking through Trinity College Dublin’s Zoological Museum, Colin narrates the story of the pygmy hippo, brought from Sierra Leone to Dublin Zoo in 1873, who died soon after arriving. He decries the arrogant belief held by humans that we are central and superior, as asserted by both biblical and evolutionary texts – a principal adhered to as justification for war and genocide.
As Colin navigates the stairwell of a block of flats, he relates the failed Corbusian utopia of Frank Robertson’s Divis Flats in West Belfast, the Benthamite panopticon which allowed both state forces and paramilitaries to navigate unseen.
Finally, Colin walks along the mountainous ridge dividing counties Fermanagh and Cavan, including the bronze-age burial cairn found there and the nearby, but as-yet unfound, burial site of Columba McVeigh, “disappeared” by the Provisionals in 1975. Contemplating again our belief in human superiority, he concludes that the continuing existence of “things” makes them “more alive than anything” and that over time “we all mingle in the same dirt.”
Niamh McCann, ‘someone decides, hawk or dove’, installation view; photographs by Simon Mills, images courtesy of the artist and The MAC.
The video is accompanied by a sculpture – a Dantean hybrid, with three pygmy hippo heads standing on three seagull legs, forming a weird monstrous shamrock. Along with the blind dog, the pygmy hippo and the gull appear throughout the show, in various roles.
Contextualised by the video, the Tall Gallery is certainly the show’s most important part. Two stills from the film are printed onto reflective brass, their distressing title taken from its narrative, Naming is Power, Mapping is Power, Boundaries are Power (2023). One shows Colin walking through the border woodland, and the other, the cairn with trees behind. As we stand before the latter, our reflection places us in the spaces between the trees, moving in and out, like the equestrian in Magritte’s The Blank Signature (1965). Nearby, standing on white-painted breeze blocks, is Ambition (2022), the pygmy hippo and the gull, both painted black, with gilded details. The gull holds in its beak a chicken nugget – an appropriation of discarded fast food resulting in cannibalism.
Claddagh Ring slash Stick (2022) has the bird torn into two, its head impaled onto one end of a cane knot, its foot at its other end. Through the loop of the knot are two irregular neon lines – competing, human-made borders, partitioning the mutilated body.
Niamh McCann, ‘someone decides, hawk or dove’, installation view; photographs by Simon Mills, images courtesy of the artist and The MAC.
A lambeg drum, representing what McCann calls “competing tribal identity”, sits on the floor of an adjoining space, peaceful in its silence, but with sticks provided for hawkish viewers to bang, if they so desire. In addition to the pygmy hippo and the gull, it is decorated with chicken nugget motifs, along with yellow flowers, originating in the pygmy hippo’s homeland. In the same space is Confetti (2022-3), referring to another Carson poem, Belfast Confetti, and its “hyphenated line”, but here a curved line of less-deadly house bricks, silver plated and flying in an arc, like a repeated act or a stop-frame animation. Either way, these signify an act of defiance by the powerless in the face of state aggression.
The seagull is a habitual thief, snatching food from the fingers of alfresco diners, with no sense of guilt or shame. This moral judgment is, of course, an anthropomorphic projection on our part. In this cartoon world, the gull is the powerful exploiter, while those with empathy – the pygmy hippos – will gain their peace and justice by learning to undermine and overturn the doctrines of past ages: “Naming is power, mapping is power, boundaries are power.” However, the roles of the three creature-signifiers are complex, and I found my readings of the show in continual self-contradictory flux. Such is the pleasurable/painful nature of work which throws up such dialectical procedures of looking.
Colin Darke is an artist based in Belfast.
