Interview with Miriam de Búrca

23/03/19

Interview with Miriam de Búrca

Protest and Remembrance
Miriam de Búrca | Joy Gerrard | Mary Griffiths | Barbara Walker
Alan Cristea Gallery, London

28 February – 30 March 2019

Through her work, Miriam de Búrca (b1972, Munich) seeks to draw attention to burial sites in Ireland known as cilliní, where, as recently as the 1980s, anyone deemed unworthy by the Catholic church of a burial in consecrated ground was laid to rest – or, rather, not to rest, since theology teaches that their unblessed souls remain for ever in limbo. These unfortunate and unknown strangers include stillborn or unbaptised babies, unmarried mothers, those who have taken their own lives, the mentally ill and excommunicates. The absence of headstones adds to the wilful desire to make people forget and to suppress this long chapter of Irish history. But De Búrca believes it should be remembered – those buried should be remembered – and, by making careful drawings of the plants growing on the graves and, in the process, paying absolute attention to detail, she seeks to pay back some of the attention that those buried have been denied. Having finished with the sods of earth in her studio, she then returns them to the graves, hoping further to show a sign of respect and return some of the lost dignity. 

Watch the interview here

Interview with Joy Gerrard

23/03/19

Interview with Joy Gerrard

Protest and Remembrance
Miriam de Búrca | Joy Gerrard | Mary Griffiths | Barbara Walker
Alan Cristea Gallery, London
28 February – 30 March 2019

Working with hand-ground Japanese ink, Joy Gerrard (b1971, Dublin) makes small drawings and large canvases depicting bird’s-eye views of mass protests, here specifically anti-Brexit and anti-Trump marches from June 2018. Consciously working from media images – primarily stills from helicopter footage – which she collects in their hundreds, Gerrard selects those images that she will turn into her monochrome drawings, getting to know the image and memorialising it in the process. From these, she then may select a couple to work up into a large canvas – using the same medium, but to very different, almost abstract effect. This time, she works from the drawing, concentrating on areas of tone and shade, creating a strong composition, built up in small sections. Overall, her aim is to make visible the masses who attend these protests, which she strongly believes canmake a difference. Her work not only takes protest – and remembrance – as its themes, but it is, in itself, a form of protest.

Watch the interview here

Review of Frieze Talks: Sexuality, Politics and Protest at Frieze London Art Fair 2013

21/10/13

Frieze London Art Fair 2013

Frieze Talks: Sexuality, Politics and Protest

Friday 18 October 2013, 13:30

Neil Bartlett (Theatre Director, Author and Performer, Brighton)

Marlene McCarty (Artist, New York)

Zanele Muholi (Photographer, Johannesburg)

Chair: Jennifer Kabat (Writer, New York)

Political theorist Hannah Arendt (1906-1975) drew a strict distinction between ‘labour’ (‘animal laborans’) – the biological processes of the human body: spontaneous growth, metabolism, and eventual decay; ‘work’ (‘homo faber’) – once you start employing implements and separating yourself from nature, creating an artificial world of things; and ‘action’ (‘vita activa’) – political acts, such as speech acts, which separate and distinguish one man from another, but which take place directly between men without the intermediary of things or matter. As such, she placed art firmly within the realm of work, not action, since, generally speaking, it creates a tangible product.

Obviously, however, things are not quite this clear cut. For starters, art, if you allow for performance art in particular, does not always leave behind a tangible trace. Moreover, however, art is very commonly employed for political purposes: to express a particular viewpoint, or to protest against the status quo. 

To read the rest of this review, please go to: http://www.divamag.co.uk/category/arts-entertainment/art-as-activism-artists-debate-at-frieze