Displacement and Belonging: New programme opens at Rua Red

THE artists Candice Breitz, Morag Myerscough, Brognon Rollin, and Array Collective will be featured in the programme ‘Displacement and Belonging’, which will take place throughout 2023–2024, reports Ryan Butler.

The new programme at Rua Red will examine the barriers and laws that foster social and cultural isolation and inhibit a sense of place or community belonging.

The personal tales of displacement and belonging of the people of South Dublin County and beyond will be highlighted as artists examine issues including power, displacement, animosity, international politics, and geopolitics.

The programme’s opening event will feature Love Story, a seven-channel installation by South African artist Candice Breitz that explores mechanisms of identification and the circumstances in which empathy is generated.

The basis for Love Story is the personal accounts of six people who left their home nations due to a variety of repressive circumstances.

The piece, which drew inspiration from in-depth conversations with the six participants in the countries where they are applying for asylum or have already received it, conjures up the global scope of the alleged “refugee crisis.”

In Love Story, the interviewees’ personal narratives are repeated twice. In the installation’s first room, Alec Baldwin and Julianne Moore – cast as themselves: “an actor” and “an  actress” – are featured in a montage of re-performed excerpts from the six interviews.

The original interviews, now personally voiced by the people whose lived experience they capture, unfold across six suspended screens in a second area that can only be accessed through the first.

Love Story highlights concerns about how and where our attention is focused by suspending audiences between the grim first-hand tales of people who would ordinarily stay nameless and faceless in the media and an approachable drama with two performers who are the very personification of visibility.

The National Gallery of Victoria, Outset Germany, and Medienboard Berlin-Brandenburg commissioned Love Story for display in the South African Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2017.

The South Dublin County Council Arts Office and the Arts Council of Ireland both fund this project.

For full access to all content on Echo.ie and to support the continuation of local news and local journalism in your community subscribe HERE.

Thanks for your ongoing support.