Walid Raad - some sources

A great profile of Raad and the Atlas Group in Bidoun which taught me a lot:

http://www.bidoun.org/magazine/02-we-are-old/profile-walid-raad-the-atlas-group-opens-its-archives-by-kaelen-wilson-goldie/

Also the Art Forum article quoted in the last post:

http://www.artforum.com/diary/id=38161

Walid Raad

A class conversation about Walid Raad has got me thinking. 

While discussing The Atlas Group (www.theatlasgroup.org) and the way which the project uses the formal language of the archive, I wondered whether his work was ever shown in Beirut? It occurred to me that the poignant humour of The Atlas Group makes a lot of sense to an elitist art audience in the West, but I wondered how it played to the viewing public in Beirut, if ever shown there. I was also curious about what the language of archive being used means there and the distance between the interpretations of The Atlas Group's work between its two homes.

Turns out it is currently showing in Beirut! [http://www.sfeir-semler.com/gallery-artists/the-atlas-group-walid-raad/ and [http://www.sfeir-semler.com/beirut/current-exhibition.html] It is more often shown with galleries in Europe than Lebanon and the rest of the region, but what I have read no longer leads me to attribute this to an audience problem. What I have found, instead of an example of art world bias was an example of my own. In looking into this I found myself conducting a (highly unscientific) quantitative analysis of where Raad has shown and scouring articles about his shows trying to create a statistical picture to back up my original theory. What I found instead was that I have little idea of what the arts look like in the Middle East beyond my own assumptions.

Art Forum describe the current improbable growth of the Beirut contemporary art scene thus:

There are more artists, galleries, and nonprofit arts organizations than ever before. Initiatives that began as youthful ambitions and scattershot plans have matured into more or less sustainable institutions. Patrons and financial backers both clean and questionable have begun filtering into the system, offering various forms of funding and support. And still the quality of critical discourse remains bracingly high. “It’s becoming impossible to live here,” the curator Ghada Waked told me two weeks ago, as we were standing outside the opening of a splashy new gallery in Mar Mikhael. “But there is still something about Beirut. There is an urgency to the issues and the discussion of ideas that you don’t find anywhere else. — Kaelen Wilson-Goldie

The article surprised me into acknowledging the extent of my euro-centric bias. I started researching this post looking for proof that Raad’s work only functioned for a Western elite, not because of any cynicism in his work but because of my own assumption that there was no ‘art elite’ in Lebanon to receive the work.  (The idea of art being made for an elite still holds issues for me but that’s for another day.) I am amazed how often this is happening to me recently. I am experiencing a profound and occasionally uncomforatble unpicking of bias since starting my MA. And I couldn’t be happier.

Laundry - Anu Productions

Image: Poster for Laundry by Anu Productions, from http://stagedreaction.wordpress.com/2011/10/06/walking-with-magdalens-laundry-at-the-dublin-theatre-festival/

At The Future State of Ireland Conference Miriam Haughton (UCD) delivered a paper on Anu Productions production Laundry. It was an extremely powerful and emotive paper which led to extensive and valuable discussion of shame in Irish society and how this contributes to the climate of crisis. I am grateful to have heard it.

Laundry (from what I have learned since - I regrettably didn't know about the work until after its run had ended) is an immersive and intimate experience of performance which leads the viewer individually through a former Magdalene laundry on Sean MacDermot street and encounters with actors playing 'Maggies', women  perceived to be fallen, who were incarcerated in work asylums. Lisa Fitzgerald writes: 

The Laundries took their name from Mary Magdalene, who in popular Christian lore is a former prostitute or immoral woman who repents and becomes one of Christ’s disciples. The philosophy behind the Laundries was that ‘fallen’ women – women who had engaged in sexual behaviour outside of marriage – could work and repent there and so be redeemed... They were a response to prostitution and were intended as a rehabilitative response to unsanctioned female sexuality . By the twentieth century the Laundries in Ireland were housed in Convents and offered a community laundry service, though it is well documented that the women working there were not paid for their labour, and by the 1930s were often or normally prevented from leaving the Laundry unless a family member – in some places, a male family member– signed them out. Women were signed into the Laundries because they became pregnant outside of marriage, or were victims of rape or sexual abuse, or were orphaned, or were in various ways disruptive of the dominant social order (including, it seems, that they were too pretty and likely to be a temptation to men). Those entering the Laundries were renamed, and in at least some cases their own names were lost – a number were buried in mass graves within the Convent grounds, their deaths not registered with the State and their given names not recorded.
Fitzpatrick, Lisa (2012) Representing Systemic Violence: The Example of Laundry by Anu Productions. Warwick Politics and Performance Network Working Papers Vol 1:4, University of Warwick, pp.1-2 [Internet publication]

The production by Anu gives voice to the Maggies, as they became known colloquially, but also allows for a  working through of the cultural memory by the audience. The shame of the Magdalene laundries continues to run deep through Irish society. The huge institutions, like the Gloucester Street laundry below, the site of Laundry, dominated the the tenement landscape around it, demonstrating a community complicity in what was happening o the women who were imprison, and often died there.

Image: John Fitzpatrick/Twitter via ibtimes.co.uk

By presenting the performance in the original site of trauma and by leading the audience through intimate encounters with Maggie's it allows for a much needed personal and cultural confrontation of the memory and the culture of complicity. It denies the temptation to relegate the chapter to history, but instead asserts that it must be confronted as a lived and active experience. This is vital considering that the last Magdalene was committed as recently as 1995, and the effects of it still resonate throughout Irish society.

On a personal note Miriam Haughton's paper on the performance brought the tragedy of the Magdalene's back into my consciousness and begged me to engage with it. Previously I had viewed the laundry's a 'the South's shame' something that didn't penetrate the border. Researching this post however I found that there had also been these laundries in Belfast, and that they were not only run by Catholics, but also the Presbyterian church, my religious community. Now more than ever I wished I had experienced Laundry. As it turns out I have my own cultural complicity to bear.

Watch an excerpt of Laundry here, courtesy of Anu Productions:

Looking Back to New Beginnings

A merry confluence of happenstance, luck and inspiration found me working as an intern on The Future State of Ireland conference (www.thefuturestate.org.uk) at Goldsmiths on the 17-18th November 2012. I found myself suddenly engaged with my island in a way that I haven't been since moving from politics into art 4 years ago. In fact I don't think I have ever truly engaged with Ireland as I find myself doing now.

Simultaneously my MA in Contemporary Art Theory has been helping me to deconstruct a number of unhelpful, and frankly judgemental, positions that I have backed myself into. A little knowledge is a dangerous thing I see now, as I work the kinks of these unhelpful contortions out of my system. 

And so I find myself in the most open and affirmative frame of mind that I can ever remember being in. Which is good, since I am also flooded with ideas for writing and projects, overwhelmed with creative drive and a need to make.

The conference left me captured by the troublesome idea of 'Irishness' and more precisely the burden of those seeking to capture or represent it. I want to talk to them, to 'trouble' the idea of Irishness and to start a discussion around the violence that this concept is doing to the collective self-worth of the island. (Thank you www.troublingireland.com bringing the concept of 'troubling into my life! It has fundamentally changed my practice.)

It is unhelpfully easy to communicate Irishness, to make it translate across cultures, with the creators and users of stereotype having much to answer for. For me even thinking about it presents a problem, with the crushing self-doubt of the impostor seeking to block my every advance into the subject. I must continually remind myself that this is a part of the modern discussion of Irishness, the conflicted emotions of an outsider within and an insider without.

So I want to use this blog as a pinboard where I can feel my way through these questions of Irishness, where I can discuss, collect and form ideas that will influence my practice. It will perform as a creative journal, charting my way through the Transcultural Memory module of my MA and hopefully helping me to knit my research and my practice.