The Remembering Game. Exhibition, Siamsa Tíre, Co. Kerry, 2014.
The Remembering Game was a museum-style exhibition of contemporary art that examined the 1834 Ballyeagh Faction Fight through the lens of alternate histories and probable accounts. Using artifacts, video, photographs and stories, history is treated as a three-dimensional space rather than a single, straight line.
Each year on the feast St. John: the 24th of June, the people of North Kerry and beyond would gather on the strand at Ballyeagh, close to the town of Ballybunion, for the annual Cashen horse races. On this day in 1834, the festive events were cut short by the gathering of two huge factions: the Lawlor- Black Mulvahills, and The Cooleens. These factions engaged in a bloody battle against one another that would trickle down the channels of history, and has remained in the regional imagination and collective memory to this day.
Conflict has shaped the roads, the hedgerows, the imagination and the identities of Ireland, and an investigation into conflict is an investigation into the psyche of its people.
