HEADLINES 07|07|2023
13|07|2023
The Bolex Boys. Independent film makers Michael Mulcahy and John Mulcahy pose with the Bolex 16mm cameras they used to record life in North Kerry in the 1970s.
LISTOWEL INTERNATIONAL STORY TELLING FESTIVAL
Thursday 14 September: Ciarán Walsh ‘curates’ The Bolex Boys: An Adventure in Storytelling in Film, a public conversation with filmmakers John Lynch & Michael Mulcahy who created an extraordinary cinematic record of the changing social and cultural landscape of North Kerry from the 1970s onwards.
MORE INFO: LISTOWEL INTERNATIONAL STORY TELLING FESTIVAL | CURATOR.IE
14|07|2023
The Library of Trinity College, University of Dublin has given Marie Coyne and Inishbofin Heritage Museum permission to print a limited edition of 100 fine art prints of the photograph Alfred Cort Haddon took in St Colman’s Monastery on 16 July 1890. This is a fundraiser, the aim being to recover the costs incurred by Inishbofin Heritage Museum during the return and burial of the remains on 15 and 16 July 2023,
You may purchase your print here
RETURN AND BURIAL OF ‘STOLEN SKULLS’ OF INISHBOFIN
Inishbofin community members excavate a grave beside St. Colman’s Monastery in preparation for the return and burial on 16 July 2023 of the remains of thirteen islanders stolen by anthropologists in 1890 and held in the Anatomy Dept, Trinity College, University of Dublin since 1892. Franc Miles (archaeologist), Ryan Lash, John Burke, John Cunnane, John Michael Coyne, Ryan Coyne and Máirtín Lavelle. Photo by Marie Coyne, Inishbofin Heritage Museum. MORE
EXHIBITION OF PHOTOGRAPHS BY CHARLES R. BROWNE
Long history short, the discovery in 2012 – in a photo-ethnographic archive Charles R. Browne compiled in 1897 – of a photograph Haddon took of thirteen skulls he stole on Inishbofin triggered a campaign by islanders to secure the return for burial of the remains of their ancestors. The burial takes place on 16 July 2023, 133 years to the day the remains were stolen. To mark the occasion Inishbofin Heritage Museum and curator.ie in collaboration with Special Collections and Digital Collections at Trinity College, University of Dublin, will present an outdoor exhibition that will add the living faces of islanders Browne recorded in Inishbofin in 1893 to the remains recovered in 2023 from the anthropological collection in the Anatomy Dept of the university.
BOOK LAUNCH | SEPTEMBER 2020
The fifth volume in a series on Anthropology’s Ancestors, Alfred Cort Haddon: A Very English Savage is an innovative account of one of the least-understood characters in the history of anthropology. Walsh uses previously overlooked, primary sources to argue that Haddon, the grandson of anti-slavery activists, set out to revolutionise anthropology in the 1890s in association with a network of anarcho-utopian activists and philosophers and, most importantly, pointed Douglas Hyde and John Millington Synge in the direction of the life and lore of folk living on islands off the west coast of Ireland. MORE
about curator.ie
Ciarán Walsh set up curator.ie in 2010 as a vehicle for innovative curatorial projects with a strong public engagement component and a collaborative ethos. The emphasis quickly shifted from contemporary visual arts and media projects to an engagement with historical, social documentary photography and the stories associated with it.
Gearóid Cheaist Ó Catháin and Dáithí De Mórdha standing in front of a photograph taken of Gearóid shortly after the Great Blasket Island was evacuated in 1953. Gearóid was the last child to live on the island and was dubbed the loneliest child in the world in a newspaper article.
In 2020, the project entered a really exciting post-doc, research and development phase. Walsh completed a PhD in anthropology and set about placing his ground-breaking research into the public domain across a range of platforms and media, using the project model he developed in a series of critically-acclaimed exhibitions.
He launched the series in Inis Meáin in 2009 with John Millington Synge, Photographer, which was a big hit in Paris the following year. He followed this with The Irish Headhunter, the Photograph Albums of Charles R. Browne (2012-15), a ‘lost’ history of Victorian ethnography in Ireland. An Island Portrait (2013), a visual history of the Blasket Island community, developed out of this and led to the curation of other photographic collections connected with the Aran Islands.
The discovery of a ‘lost’ collection of photographic negatives in 2014 was the starting point for a six-year project that focused on the photography of Alfred Cort Haddon, an anti-racism activist whose work on the Aran Islands anticipated many of the features of modern anthropology and, I propose, pointed Synge in the direction of the Aran Islands.
Haddon took this photograph on Inis Meáin in 1892 and added the caption “Inishmaan, Faherty refused to be measured, and the women would not even tell us their names” when he included it in “The Ethnography of the Aran Islands,” which the Royal Irish Academy published in 1893. Courtesy of the Board of Trinity College, the University of Dublin.
Walsh’s work on Haddon is widely recognised as ground-breaking, not least because it went against the grain of most histories of Anglo-Irish anthropology. It also anticipated a vigorous, public engagement with colonial legacies triggered by a resurgence in the Black Lives Matter Movement in 2020. That caught the academy off-guard, but it put Walsh at the forefront of an exciting new phase in public history and the curatorial model he developed was a good fit for the current focus on public engagement with archives and a parallel movement in people’s histories.
Walsh has written a book on Haddon that Berghahn Books New York commissioned in 2021 and the manuscript went into production in August 2022. The copy editor completed work on the manuscript in December, with production commencing in January 2023.
Meanwhile, Bérose International Encyclopaedia of the Histories of Anthropology commissioned a review of Haddon’s life and work:
https://www.berose.fr/article2641.html?lang=en.
He is currently working with Dearcán Media on a feature documentary for TG4 and BBC that deals with colonial legacies and features a campaign to have skulls Haddon and Dixon stole in the west of Ireland in 1890 returned by TCD to the communities of origin. The is project constitutes a continuation of his engagement with colonial legacies that began with his work on Synge in 2009.
He worked as archivist / curator on the Ann Doherty Collection for Donegal County Council Archives and is co-curated the exhibition A Common Humanity with Caroline Carr and her team in Donegal County Museum, which opened in September 2022. He completed a curator and public historian project for Dun-Laoghaire-Rathdown County Council in November 2022.
Ann Doherty, 1999, Armenia: church opening in Lall after the collapse of communism, digital scan of black and white photographic negative. With permission of Donegal County Council Archive Services ©.
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current research / publications
www.curator.ie is managed by Ciarán Walsh.
