curator.ie | innovate – engage – excite
OLD THEMES | NEW DIRECTIONS
curator.ie returns to core themes first explored in an exhibition of photographs John Millington Synge took during his first visit to the Aran Islands in 1898. Ciarán Walsh developed this story in A Very English Savage in the context of colonial legacies and focussed on links between anthropology and anti-colonial activism in Ireland in the 1890s. The ‘Haddon and the Aran Islands’ exhibition extracted the photographs that tell this story and reconnected them with the photographs Synge took.
The current project involves a book – a photo album – that takes this work in a new direction, moving away from an academic environment and back to a more meaningful engagement with public histories and heritage management through curatorial projects that have a strong public engagement ethos.
This connects with an exploration of storytelling through film at a community level, a project that builds upon The Bolex Boys exhibition that opened in Kerry Writers’ Museum in October 2023. This involved the digital restoration of a feature documentary John Lynch made in 1971 and remastered in 1978 with a narrative ‘rap’ devised by Eamon Keane and recorded by Michael Mulcahy. It was a masterclass in storytelling and the restoration of the film is a showcase for the management of intangible heritage in a digital age. This work continues with other independent film makers who were active in north Kerry during the same period, Leo Finucane and Paul Kennelly included.
In 1978 Leo Finucane filmed a two-minute interview with Donal Bill Sullivan about his role in the roadside execution by Black and Tans of three IRA volunteers on Thursday, May 12, 1921. Finucane recently found the reel in his archive and curator.ie and Kerry Writers’ Museum commissioned the digital restoration of the film by Julien Dorgere of Super8Ireland. The restored clip will be shown in October 2024 as part of a gathering of all the people who participated in Finucane’s films over four decades.
Ciarán Walsh and Jim Sheridan at The Bolex Boys exhibition at Kerry Writers’ Museum in February 2024
OTHER STORIES
A Very English Savage
is also a book about photography and it pivots on Haddon’s discovery of ‘instantaneous’ or social documentary photography in the Aran Islands in 1890. I argue that this led to an experiment in cinematography in the Torres Strait in 1898 and, given his radically anticolonial attitude and subversive intent, these four minutes of film stand as a singularly modernist achievement in anthropology. I also argue against that Haddon’s slideshows about the Aran Islands were a form of anticolonial activism that provided an ethnographic baseline for cultural nationalists like Hyde and literary modernists like Synge. Academic publishing severely limits the scope for photography as an alternative to text and this aspect of Haddon’s work was explored in ‘Haddon and the Aran Islands’, an exhibition of twenty five photographs at the Royal Anthropological Institute in London.
Alfred Cort Haddon, A Very English Savage is available at Books Upstairs | Dublin’s Oldest Independent Bookshop.
’The Bolex Boys’
exhibition takes its name from the famous 16mm camera and profiles the work of independent filmmakers John Lynch & Michael Mulcahy. They created an extraordinary cinematic record of the changing social and cultural landscape of North Kerry from the 1970s onwards. The exhibition opened in Kerry Writers’ Museum on 19 October 2023 with a special screening of a newly digitised and restored copy of their 1971 masterpiece The Way I Remember It, featuring a script Eamon Keane devised and narrated in 1978 in a masterclass of storytelling.
Funded by the Regional Museums Exhibition Scheme 2023, Department of Tourism, Culture, Arts, Gaeltacht, Sport and Media.
curator.ie | some background
Making History: https://fb.watch/nu8Ph0T_jp
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. His ability to find ‘lost’ material and use it to tell new stories led to a funded PhD in 2015, which he completed in June 2020. He currently works as a freelance curator and writer using the project model he developed in a series of critically-acclaimed exhibitions.
He launched the series on Inis Meáin in the Aran Islands in 2009 with John Millington Synge, Photographer, which was a big hit at Le Centre Culturel Irlandais in Paris the following year and the Irish Museum of Modern Art incorporated the exhibition into ‘The Moderns‘. He followed this with The Irish Headhunter, the Photograph Albums of Charles R. Browne (2012-23), a ‘lost’ history of Victorian ethnography in Ireland. An Island Portrait (2013) developed out of this project and pushed the format of a visual history beyond text, telling the story of the Blasket Island community as revealed in a wide range of photographic archives. This led to the curation of other photographic collections connected with the Aran Islands. The discovery in 2014 of a ‘lost’ collection of photographic negatives made in the islands in 1890 was the starting point for a six-year project that focused on the photography of Alfred Cort Haddon. This project culminates in the exhibition Haddon and the Aran Islands in the Royal Anthropological Institute, opening in October 2023 and running until February 2024. The exhibition in the Royal Anthropological Institute in London in October 2023. The exhibition sets the scene for the launch of ‘Alfred Cort Haddon, A Very English Savage, Walsh’s provocative study of Haddon’s art and activism in Ireland in the 1890s.
Walsh’s work on Haddon is widely recognised as ground-breaking because it went against the grain of most histories of anthropology, especially Anglo-Irish anthropology in relation to cultural naturalism, literary modernism and colonial legacies. In 2022, Bérose International Encyclopaedia of the Histories of Anthropology began the process of rewriting the history of Anglo-Irish anthropology when it commissioned ‘Artist, Philosopher, Ethnologist and Activist: The Life and Work of Alfred Cort Haddon (1855-1940)’, a preview of A Very English Savage. 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.
Peoples’ history is the cornerstone of ‘The Bolex Boys’ project, a collaboration with Kerry Writers’ Museum and the Department of Tourism, Culture, Arts, Gaeltacht, Sport and Media through the Regional Museums exhibition Scheme 2023. ‘The Bolex Boys’ exhibition opens in Kerry Writers’ Museum on October 19 2023. The project developed in tandem with ‘Haddon and the Aran Islands’ and features the work of independent filmmaker John Lynch whose film The Way I Remember It (1971) became the basis for a collaboration with film maker and sound-man Michael Mulcahy and actor Eamon Keane, whose narration is a remarkable achievement in the art of story telling. Lynch and Mulcahy documented life in rural North Kerry over fifty years, producing a remarkable archive of social history that shares much with the ethnographic imagination explored in ‘Haddon and the Aran Islands’, which ends with Haddon’s brief experiment in cinema in 1898.
Both projects build on experience gained working on the Ann Doherty Project, which Niamh Brennan (Donegal County Council Archive Services) and Caroline Carr (Donegal County Museum) developed with funding from the Heritage Council’s Heritage Stewardship Fund. The Heritage Council also provided R&D funding for The Irish Headhunter project way back in 2012 and, eleven years on, the project mix remains essentially the same: finding overlooked archives and devising innovative ways to excite public’s imagination about the social possibility of photography and film.
Public engagement is at the heart of each of these projects, as exemplified by the ten-year collaboration with Marie Coyne of Inishbofin Heritage Museum. Coyne engaged with the The Irish Headhunter project in 2012 and focus quickly turned to a collection of twenty four skulls Haddon stole in 1890 and gifted to TCD in 1893. In July 2023, TCD returned half of the collection for burial on Inishbofin. Walsh and Coyne, in collaboration with the Manuscript Library and Digital Collections at TCD, curated an outdoor exhibition of Browne’s photographs to add faces and life stories to the ancestral remains that had become known as ‘the stolen skulls of Inishbofin’. The Old Anatomy Steering Committee in TCD is stalling on the return of the remains of eleven other individuals to communities in St. Finian’s Bay and the Aran Islands. The campaign continues.
Independent film maker John Lynch with the 16mm Bolex camera he used to document life in rural north Kerry in the 1970s and 1980s.
Ciarán Walsh working on a collection of photographs Ann Doherty gifted to the Donegal County Council Archives Service in 2021.
Michael Gibbons, archaeologist, guiding scholars from Note Dame University through an exhibition of photographs of Inishbofin which Haddon, Charles R. Browne and his brother John took between 1890 and 1893. Ciarán Walsh and Marie Coyne, Inishbofin Heritage Museum, in collaboration with the Manuscripts Library, Special Collections and Digital Collections in TCD curated the exhibition as part of the return and burial of the remains of thirteen individuals Haddon stole in 1890 and gifted to TCD in 1895.
The Haddon & Dixon collection of ancetral remains stolen from community burial grounds in Inishbofin, the Aran Islands and St Finian’s Bay (the Glen) in Kerry. The collection is part of the Anthropological Collection assembled in the 1890s and displayed in a branch of Francis Galton’s eugenics laboratory in TCD. The School of Medicine at TCD plans to incorporate this into a redevloped Anatomy Museum.To date, TCD School of Medicine retains the remains of eleven individuals that Haddon and Dixon stone from the Aran Islands and St Finian’s Bay
Andrei Nacu, curator at the Royal Anthropological Institute, and Ciarán Walsh, curator.ie, at the Haddon and the Aran Islands exhibition in London.
current research / publications
www.curator.ie is managed by Ciarán Walsh.