Máthair, Arnolfini

Exhibiiton:

A preview event and screening of Máthair, with the opportunity to meet the artist,on Friday 25 October, 6:30pm-8pm. Following this the film was shown on loop across the weekend, 11am to 6pm Saturday, 11am to 5pm Sunday.

Máthair

In 1954 an Irish woman travelled alone to England to give birth in secret in a Catholic Mother and Baby Home in Bristol. She then returned to Ireland having given up the baby to the nuns. This event is the departure point for Keira Greene’s film Máthair (2024). As the daughter of the child who was left in the home, Greene traces her family story along the matrilinear line, the resulting film enters into the gaps in memory and record.

Máthair offers a fragmented and elliptical account of a search for knowledge in the face of institutional oppression and obfuscation; the film resists linear narrative and documentary modes, instead offering us an intense and revelatory encounter with a shared family trauma. Scant records and redacted documents describe the negation and erasure of those who passed through the church’s homes for unmarried mothers. The sensory lives of these ungraspable women are embodied in choreographed phrases performed by a group of four dancers, whose costumed movements both gesture towards and subvert the constrictive clothing regulations of Catholic institutions and the forced female labour in the church’s laundries. Glimpses of this performance are threaded between a chaotic collage of archival material and present-day online chat rooms; the only respite is found in the holding space of the landscape and the bodies of water between England and Ireland. The silences of the archive are countered by a dissonant sound score, a pulsing polyphonic composition, dense with complex sensory impressions, a chorus of unvoiced voices compelling us to stay with the problem.

Workshop:

A workshop for writing and lens-based practice. Presented in connection with the screening of Máthair at Arnolfini, Friday 25 to Sunday 27 October, please click here for details.

we passed the flame: we wonder

what saved us? what for?

– H.D., The Walls Do Not Fall (1942)

Artist Keira Greene and poet Kimberly Campanello invite you to reflect on what at first glance appears to be empty, absent, and quiet; but which may also be a source of imagery, language, and cacophony. We will explore how to disrupt habitual patterns of thinking and perception, through a range of improvisational exercises in filmmaking and writing.

This event is part of the two artists’ ongoing research into Mother and Baby Homes in Ireland and the UK.

Keira Greene is an artist working across film, photography, performance and text. Her work is preoccupied with the social and organic life and landscape of specific environments. Her work is produced through a collaborative and conversational practice of looking, writing and forming enduring relationships. Recent works are concerned with ideas of the body and the experience of emotion, in dialogue with an embodied filmmaking practice.

Across Kimberly Campanello‘s writing in whatever form it takes – prose, poetry, objects, asemics, translations, versions, performances – her abiding preoccupation is with the power of language to ‘change states’ in all senses of the phrase – changing our understandings of the law and the State, changing our emotional-physical-spiritual-intellectual states, and changing its own state as each word shifts and morphs with every use and encounter.

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