Live performances - Venice

Live performances – Venice

Live performance-experiments of Memory Theatre with composer Tom Lane at Palazzo Tiepolo Passi, Calle Centani, San Polo 2774, Venice, 24 October

Kirwan presented a series of live experiment-performances together with the

award- winning Dublin-based composer Tom Lane and video installations at Palazzo Tiepolo Passi, Venice, Italy in October, 2019.

During the performance, Kirwan made seemingly endless marks on large panels using large pieces of charcoal. These acts of futile repetition echoed the absurd processes which echo the searching and yearning evokes the searching which some psychologists consider intrinsic to the bereavement process; the sensorimotor, haptic elements of her performances, become metaphors for wayﬁnding and mapping through the bewilderment and wilderness of bereavement.

Repetition lies at the heart of Kirwan’s work drawing on the Hegelian concept of memory as repetition that constantly reinvents itself. She is interested in the philosopher Simon Critchley’s insights into Hegel’s conception of memory, not as a dull recitation of the past but rather, as a dynamic process akin to transportation: a wheel that turns, returns and turns again…a permanently recreating and re-enacting loop.

Simultaneously, the composer Tom Lane responded to Kirwan’s mark-making by creating a spontaneous and improvised soundscape thus visitors were immersed in a compelling, meditative experience as they watch the repetitions of the mark-making and hear the haunting sound.

Videos showing performances of her mark making in other contexts and extracts from her videos Fragment and Trace (2015) and Memory Theatre (2017) in particular were also installed in the space. Part of her ongoing inquiry into mourning, loss and memorial they complemented her three-channel video work, perpetuum mobile, which had been unveiled at the European Cultural Centre, Palazzo Bembo during the 58th Venice Biennale.

Memory Theatre at Grand Canal / Palazzo Bembo, Riva del Carbon Venice, May 2019

Kirwan attempts to measure and empty the Venetian canals with her buckets. This is the ﬁrst time she performs for a live audience in Venice, scheduled according to the local tide tables. Kirwan explores the metaphorical performance of memory through her futile, absurd performances, endlessly repeated. The sensorimotor/ haptic connections between her body, the land and the elements serve also as metaphors for way-ﬁnding and navigation through the confusion and fog of loss and bereavement. She is interested in the question of what is memory and how might it function and be visually represented.

Kirwan’s ﬁrst absurd experiments with measuring and attempts to empty the sea were ﬁlmed on a seashore in Kent, UK during 2015. This footage, together with performances of other futile tasks in Morocco, and Ireland were edited to create her two-channel video Memory Theatre (2017). She has also performed for live audiences e.g. on the beach in Folkestone, UK, during the Folkestone Triennial Fringe.

Memory Theatre became the second in a trilogy of videos all inaugurated during the 56th, 57th and 58th Venice Biennales respectively: Fragment and Trace (2015), Memory Theatre (2017), and perpetuum mobile (2019). perpetuum mobile, an immersive three-screen video installation including Kirwan’s performances in the ancient cedar forests of Lebanon and on the Ustyurt plateau and Aral Sea regions of Uzbekistan is currently on show in Venice at the European Cultural Centre, Palazzo Bembo, First Floor, Riva del Carbon 4793, 30124 Venice; open every day except Thursdays: 11.05.19 – 24.11.19.

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