Memory Theatre by Helen Kirwan with Tom Lane

an installation-performance-experiment

The artist Helen Kirwan is pleased to announce a new manifestation of Memory Theatre as a live performance-experiment at The Space arts centre in London on Saturday 6 January 2018.

It is the first time that the artist proposes to present Memory Theatre in this expanded form. She has re-visited this two channel video and pulled out seven fragments for installation as multiple video projection in The Space, a former Presbyterian Church in the Isle of Dogs, East London. These will be shown together with a live performance by the artist and simultaneous sound, also to be performed live, by the award-winning Dublin based composer, Tom Lane with whom Kirwan has a long standing collaboration. This is the first time that the two artists will work together in performance.

By sharing this installation-performance-experiment with the audience at The Space, Kirwan opens up the experience of the space itself to multiple interpretations, which are at once collective and singular.

Kirwan’s performances are based on seemingly endless repetitions of absurd and futile activities which express what the artist has described as ‘the physical traces of mourning.’ In the fog of bereavement, physical contact with objects and external surroundings serves as a form of mapping or orienteering. Her performative work explores the haptic and tensions between the body and sites. She explores the idea of the trace as a mark that has barely been made or that may disappear, and asks was something there, and was something left behind?

Memory Theatre, initially created as a 44-minute video incorporates a series of performances carried out by the artist and filmed in Merzouga, Morocco, Dungeness and Joss Bay, Kent and the Burren and Connemara, Ireland. The decision to expand Memory Theatre both physically and conceptually beyond its initial format, marks the artist’s long standing exploration of diverse media to convey memory, repetition and archive and stimulate multiple readings. The recorded and repeatable nature of the videos stand in contrast to the singularity of a live performance.

Memory Theatre is underpinned by Kirwan’s inquiry into the concept of the ‘philosophical fragment’. The German Romantic philosopher Frederich Schlegel posited a radical definition of this fragment as a dynamic process which aims at fragmentation for its own sake. Intrinsic to Kirwan’s futile reiterations and journeys is the essential incompletion which is itself the mode of fulfilment.

Memory Theatre was first unveiled as a two channel video installation at the group exhibition ‘Personal Structures - Crossing Borders’ at the European Cultural Centre at the 57th Biennale di Venezia. It was later screened at the Sussex Open (2017) at the Towner Art Gallery, Eastbourne, and the Folkestone Triennial Fringe (2017). Kirwan also undertook a series of live performances of Memory Theatre on the beach during the Folkestone Triennial Fringe (2017).