Ciarán Walsh
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They Echo in the Sublime Stillness of Infinity
2013
Web-based slideshow
Looped/infinite
2013
Web-based slideshow
Looped/infinite
They Echo in the Sublime Stillness of Infinity was a artwork commissioned by the online platform of Light & Wire Gallery (Los Angeles), which explored the troubling resonance of colonial histories within the spaces of European ethnographic museums.
Through a randonmly-determined stream of visual and texual material, a fictional narrative was presented in the form of an interview (the purposes of which are withheld); for their part, the interviewee describes their increasingly unsettled experiences while navigating an ethnological museum.
The work was based upon artistic research in the Ethnological Museum in Dahlem (Berlin) and the Volkskunde Museum (Hamburg), the history of the Herero genocide 1904-8 (the title of the artwork comes from a proclamation by Lothar Von Trotha), and from participant interviews in a neurological study on the negative effect of hippocampal amnesia in imagining new experiences and constructing fictional scenarios.
Through a randonmly-determined stream of visual and texual material, a fictional narrative was presented in the form of an interview (the purposes of which are withheld); for their part, the interviewee describes their increasingly unsettled experiences while navigating an ethnological museum.
The work was based upon artistic research in the Ethnological Museum in Dahlem (Berlin) and the Volkskunde Museum (Hamburg), the history of the Herero genocide 1904-8 (the title of the artwork comes from a proclamation by Lothar Von Trotha), and from participant interviews in a neurological study on the negative effect of hippocampal amnesia in imagining new experiences and constructing fictional scenarios.