]performance s p a c e [ LABOUR: 9th – 10th February, 1 – 9pm
LABOUR: a live exhibition of performances
by Northern & Southern Irish female artists
February and March 2012
PRESS RELEASE
Anne Quail – Elvira Santamaria Torres - Amanda Coogan – Pauline Cummins – Ann Maria Healy - Chrissie Cadman -Frances Mezzeti - Áine O’Dwyer
Áine Phillips – Helena Walsh - Michelle Browne
LABOUR is a touring exhibition of Live Art, featuring eleven leading female artists who are resident within, or native to, Northern and Southern Ireland. LABOUR offers audiences unprecedented access to a huge body of live performance work by some of the most radical and exciting women artists emerging from an Irish cultural context.
LABOUR will launch in London, on the 9th and 10th of February, then tour to Derry/Londonderry (Feb 24th and 25th). The final exhibition and surrounding events will take place in Dublin on March 9th and 10th to coincide with International Women’s Day 2012.
LABOUR interrogates the gendered representational frameworks prevalent within an Irish cultural context, that produce, limit and devalue, various forms of female labour. In each durational exhibition participating artists will perform simultaneously for eight consecutive hours, reflecting the duration of an average working day. Set within the shadows of Ireland’s notorious Magdalene Laundries, LABOUR explores current shifts in the political and economic climate within an Irish cultural context.
LABOUR aims to develop critical and creative dialogues around the female body in an Irish cultural context and its broader geo-political significance. The live events will be accompanied by a programme of scheduled conversations with the artists (London & Derry/Londonderry), a symposium (Dublin) and the exhibition of materials and documents from Brutal Silences: Live Art and Irish Culture – a Study Room Guide comissioned by the Live Art Development Agency and authored by participating artists Ann Maria Healy and Helena Walsh (London).
‘LABOUR promises to be of great historical significance. Issues of labour and gender are particularly critical within an Irish context, and at the same time Irish women artists or women artists based in Ireland are creating some of the most exciting and challenging performance based work of our times.’
- Lois Keidan – the Live Art Development Agency
