Output details
34 - Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory
Manchester Metropolitan University
Archiving Place and Time: Contemporary art from Northern Ireland since the Belfast Agreement
The exhibition was originated by Fionna Barber as part of a project on post-conflict representation in Northern Ireland. It was realized through collaboration with Megan Johnston, then Director of Millennium Court Arts Centre (MCAC), Portadown, Northern Ireland. Johnston is a highly regarded curator renowned for her innovative and challenging approach to post-conflict curation in Northern Ireland.
Archiving Place and Time was the first exhibition designed specifically to show British audiences how art practice has evolved in Northern Ireland since the Good Friday / Belfast Agreement in 1998. The exhibition combined the work of artists with an international reputation with those less well known outside Ireland; exhibitors were selected in order to show the diversity of responses to this new political situation across a range of different art practices. The planning for APT began a decade after the historic Belfast / Good Friday Agreement was signed, bringing an end to some thirty years of bitter conflict in Northern Ireland. The 1998 Agreement not only brought significant changes for people’s everyday lives but affected their awareness of both the preceding history and their hopes for the future, as much as it codified parity of esteem, particularly in relation to culture and language. Meanwhile as former conflict zones became sites of economic investment, definitions of space and the inevitability of history became open to question.
The work selected for this exhibition embodied subtle and nuanced responses to the huge changes signified by the Agreement. Key concerns with history, memory and the use of archival material were supplemented by insights into the effects of both urban regeneration in a post-industrial city and the reconstruction of identity, suggesting comparisons with other post-conflict scenarios elsewhere.
