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IMMA invites an esteemed panel of creative practitioners, educators, writers and activists to reflect on processes of agitation and commemoration in addressing the ‘change and challenge’, pertaining to the role of women within civil rights, politics and art today. Speakers include Susan McKay, author, journalist; Michelle Brown, artist, curator; Kate Cunningham, Women's Museum of Ireland; Pat Murphy, feminist filmmaker.
Programmed to coincide with closing weekend of The Long Note by Helen Cammock this round table discussion brings together an esteemed panel of practitioners whose influential work remembers the personnel and political struggles of pioneering women in social, political and cultural life across Ireland. Critical and creative processes of agitation and commemoration, comparative and diverging approaches will be explored.
Drawing on the panel’s individual projects and IMMA’s programme as a point of departure to consider important questions of debate, with regards today’s changes and challenges pertaining to feminist thinking, civil rights activism, as well as the evolving representation of women in social, political and cultural life, whether at the grassroots and/or in public life, in Ireland and Northern Ireland.
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The impetus for this event is the commemorative film project and this year’s Turner Prize Nominee The Long Note 2018 by artist Helen Cammock. The film-work celebrates women’s involvement in the civil rights movement in Derry in 1968, Northern Ireland and acts as a historical document that articulates the variety of political positions taken by women during the movement.
The Long Note is presented in dialogue with the major exhibition by Doris Salcedo’s Acts of Mourning that looks at the lives of those most affected by Colombia’s civil war and points to the perspective of women within wider geopolitical realities, exploring embodied histories and concepts of ‘forgetting’ and ‘memory’ in artworks. Themes found in both exhibition’s provide a catalyst to address overlapping practices and issues regarding the role and agency of ‘remembering’ and the reoccurring nature of historical events in more recent times. Topics that are especially pertinent when set against more recent debates on borders, nationalism, Brexit and new waves of feminist activism, that has seen diverse communities and artists, mobilised for a political and civil cause.
This talk took place on 25 May 2019 at IMMA
Image Credits: Helen Cammock, The Long Note, Film Still, 2018.
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- Learning