The Second Coming – Kendall Geers exhibition comes to Rua Red
By William O'Connor
The Second Coming, an exhibition by Kendell Geers, opens on June 14 in Rua Red.
Geers has created an installation of new work in response to his recent visit to The Hell Fire Club on Montpelier Hill and his ongoing research into William Butler Yeats, mysticism and the occult.
Dr Sylwia Serafinowicz, Curator, a/political; Kendell Geers, Artist and Maolíosa Boyle, Director, Rua Red
A full three centuries after William Conolly purchased Montpelier Hill, the Hell Fire Club celebrates a second coming in County Dublin.
For a few months between the Summer Solstice and Autumn Equinox, from a week before Litha to a week after Lughnasadh, the temple is open anew to the public within the galleries at Rua Red.
Although, the Hell Fire Club never closed and has continued to run, discreetly and through the underground stream of our imaginations, from urban legend to popular culture, until this very day, now, for the first time since the 18th century the flame burns bright again for all to behold.
The Second Coming is an exhibition that brings together, once more, the poet William Butler Yeats, with his Daemon and anti-self, the Berber son of Muhammad who was born in Granada 1494 as al-Hasan and grew up to become Leo Africanus.
Kendell Geers at the Hell Fire Club
They first met at a séance in Cambridge House on 9 May 1912 when Leo spoke with a strong Irish accent, giving Yeats the keys to unlocking the doors of his perception.
From that encounter Yeats understood that:
The Second Coming is a Temple of enlightenment in the form of an exhibition, a gallery of Solar consciousness sent through the prism that is the dark side of the moon “Per Amica Silentia Lunae” (Through the friendly silence of the moon). Following Yeats’ strict instructions “It is part of a religious system more or less logically worked out, a system which will, I hope, interest you as a form of poetry.”
The doors of perception that permit crossing are guarded by the sphinx beneath the sign that warns against curators, consultants, cynics, hypocrites, bigots, the pox-ridden, Goths, Magoths, the straw-chewing law clerks, usurious grinches, old or officious judges, and burners of heretics.
There are no clocks, because time is less than space, and the liberty is open to both monks and nuns, free men and women. Inside the eye of the pyramid a flame burns bright, a licentious brilliance of moral decay.
Good is evil when the rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouches towards Bethlehem and with it “Daemon est Deus inversus” (“The Devil is God inverted”.)
The exhibition runs from June 15 to August 16 and is accompanied by a publication. The exhibition is the fifth instalment of the two-year long partnership between a/political and Rua Red.
