No Way Out
Multimedia Installation with sound
A: 2.21m² P: 5.34m H: 1.76m Duration 08:40 Wexford Art CentreVoid Gallery, DerryTestimonies
Our society is increasingly concerned with monitoring, surveillance and control. This has been true even since the 18th-century, when English philosopher, Jeremy Bentham, explored the optimum architectural design of the ‘perfect prison’: the ‘Panopticon’. French philosopher Michel Foucault points out the structural homologies existing between various types of institution arising from the 17th-century, from schools to hospitals, with their organic hierarchies of experts and systems of control. Mindful of this, Nancy Rochford-Flynn reflects on the lived experience of nameless women incarcerated in the Magdalene Laundries, giving voice to their daily struggles, evoking their presence through sound, and giving presence to their memory. The work reminds us that no system of control can function without the tacit consent of the wider society. Through sound, she makes, paradoxically enough, a quiet and respectful statement. As with any event, it is the after-effect of a sound, its echo, which lingers. Professor Kenneth G. Hay Chair of Contemporary Art Leeds University, U.K. Very rich and evocative
Dr Katherine O'Donnell, Director, Women's Studies Centre UCD School of Social Justice Really Impressive Kathleen Lynch UCD Professor of Equality Studies UCD School of Social Justice Copyright © 2014 by Nancy Rochford-Flynn
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This work is informed by a series of interviews with women who were subjected to incarceration and discipline within Ireland’s Magdalene Laundries, together with individuals who were employed in these institutions and by the religious orders who ran them. Rochford-Flynn challenges the one-dimensional critique by society that the Irish Catholic Church was solely responsible for the incarceration of these women. This multimedia installation calls on its audience to acknowledge its collusion in facilitating the incarceration of women in Magdalene Institutions. Provoking a sense of memory, it provides a moment of connection and offers social, political and religious perspectives. It demonstrates how visibility or the absence of it, within architectural structure can determine patterns of authority, and focuses on how this symbolic authority manifested itself and spoke to communities external from its walls. Working with the concept of an inverted Panopticon this work attempts to establish not what is seen, but what can be ‘seen’ creating a ‘positive unconscious’ of vision (M. Foucault, 1975).
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