LABOUR is a touring exhibition of Live Art, featuring eleven leading female artists who are resident within, or native to, Northern and Southern Ireland. LABOUR interrogates the gendered representational frameworks prevalent within an Irish cultural context, that produce, limit and devalue, various forms of female labour. In each durational exhibition participating artists will perform simultaneously for eight consecutive hours, reflecting the duration of an average working day. Set within the shadows of Ireland’s notorious Magdalene Laundries, LABOUR explores current shifts in the political and economic climate within an Irish cultural context.
Benjamin Sebastian – Through a meeting of minds and hearts, at a timely conjunction of various individuals’ research and practices, the curators (Amanda Coogan, Helena Walsh and Chrissie Cadman) and myself (producer) were able to devise and implement a touring exhibition offering unprecedented exposure to some of the most dynamic and thought provoking live work, being made by women, coming out of an Irish cultural context, the inaugural launch of which took place at ]performance s p a c e [.
]performance s p a c e [ does exactly what it says on the tin. We continuously strive to maintain s p a c e where things can be performed: gender, politics, art, emotions, critique and life. We are sensitive and not censored. ]performance s p a c e [ acts as a point of synthesis and exchange, inviting, encouraging and nurturing those visual performance practices that may often find themselves outside-of, left-out-of or in-between other mediums, formats, dialogues and visual arts institutions. We are a s p a c e where those who (may or may not) find it difficult to have their work programmed, due to issues of duration, size, status, action(s) or politics, may take the time and space to create and explore their artistic endeavours. We do not ask permission. We are a space for process, a place for difficult, unresolved and evolving work.
Helena Walsh – LABOUR did not shy away from the traumas embedded within an Irish cultural context. Nor did it neglect the weight of oppression experienced by women historically. Those who trudged through the snow in London to experience LABOUR at ]performance s p a c e[ were not greeted with warmth. They were confronted with shivering, soaked, stained and soiled bodies. They encountered bodies engaged in restrained and regimented actions, as if endlessly caught in a repetitious grind.
Amidst the harshness of this grating atmosphere, however, there also emerged moments of lightness. The peaks and troughs in the communal energy during the eight-hour duration sparked occasions of loud connectivity, yet at other times, instances of collective silence. Within both the rising momentum of rhythmical rallying calls and the sharp falls into silent stillness, the potentials for developing communal strength and dialogue across the successive live exhibitions were ignited. It is through this capacity for activating multiple and new forms of expression and resistance, alongside the production of empowered discourses from and between live female bodies that LABOUR gains its performative power.
BS – I feel it is important for our audiences to acknowledge the origins and initial conceptualising of LABOUR. After reviewing the force of practices presented at Right Here, Right Now: Kilmainham Gaol, Dublin, I felt compelled to engage the practices, politics and emotions being emitted from this cultural setting. Through meeting Helena Walsh at various performance platforms – and again at ]performance s p a c e [ for an enactment of the installation by Alastair MacLennan (B E Y O N D N E C E S S I T Y) – I was directed towards ‘Brutal Silences: Live Art and Irish Culture’, (A Study Room guide commissioned by the Live Art Development Agency, co-authored by Ann Maria Healy and Helena Walsh), and experienced an instant affinity not only with the melancholic mood represented through documented photographs and film, yet also with a sadness and frustration at the apparent and profound occupation of women’s bodies, time and space within many positions of an Irish historical context.
HW – In ‘Brutal Silences’, I selected a variety of performances from female practitioners who provocatively interrogate dominant cultural constructions of femininity and subvert the moral regulation of female sexuality. I contextualize these varied performances in relation to Southern Ireland’s Magdalene Laundries, institutions of significance to contemporary discourses around gender and labour in an Irish cultural context. Since the closure of the last Magdalene Laundry in 1996, the women detained and forced to work unwaged in these Catholic-run, for-profit industrial laundries, as a form of penance for their supposed moral impurity, have battled to gain redress. The Irish state has been reluctant to acknowledge the injustice and trauma endured by these women. Following the intervention of the United Nations Committee Against Torture (UNCAT), the Irish government, in June 2011, initiated an independently chaired inquiry into these institutions.
BS – Coming from a (post)colonial heritage myself – and the personal is important here – and maintaining active solidarity with Feminist, LGBTQ and Occupy movements, I have been greatly influenced and moved by visual performance emerging from an Irish cultural context. As Assistant Director at ]performance s p a c e [ such influence has afforded me the pleasure of co-curating artists such as Helena Hamilton, Dominic Thorpe, Alastair MacLennan, Hugh O’Donnell & Sinead O’Donnell, while at the same time insisting upon an observation of the artist initiatives such as Bbeyond, The Performance Collective & Platform Arts along with institution such as Catalyst Arts, PS2 and Golden Thread Gallery. It was at this point imperative for me that a focused attention was drawn more closely towards such practices.
HW – As is the case in a variety of cultural contexts, the world over, women in Ireland have fought for political autonomy. They have struggled to gain presence and occupy space outside of the limited positions designated to them by dominant patriarchal norms. Yet equally, within an Irish cultural context there are specific circumstances, conditions and ideologies that impact on issues of gender and labour. There is a force of live artists working within an Irish context who give body to these issues.
In bringing together a diversity of female live art practitioners working within or native to Northern and Southern Ireland, across three sites of geo-political relevance, LABOUR offered a timely platform for expanding explorations of gender and labour in an Irish cultural context. Significantly, I suggest, the broad consideration of these issues contributed by the eleven artists participating in LABOUR enables the traumatic histories and realities embedded in Irish culture to be directed towards the development of empowered feminist discourses.
Helena Walsh is an Irish live artist based in London. Helena is currently undertaking a practice-based PhD in the Department of Drama, Queen Mary University of London that explores live art, femininity and Ireland.
Benjamin Sebastian is an artist-curator based in London. He is assistant director at] performance s p a c e [ which is the UK’s only performance specific art space.
‘Producing Potentials for Empowerment’ was originally written by Helena Walsh and Benjamin Sebastian for Exeunt Magazine, 12 March 2012, http://exeuntmagazine.com/features/producing-potentials-for empowerment-labour-a-written-dialogue/