With Niamh Murphy I am co-curating Future Histories a performance art event taking place on 21 May in Kilmainham Gaol, Dublin, the greatest monument to the 1916 Rising and its aftermath. Future Histories is an Open Call National Project in ART: 2016 funded by the Arts Council as part of Ireland 2016 Centenary programme. For 12 hours on this day (close to the dates 100 years ago when the leaders of the Rising were executed in the Gaol) 16 artists will perform in the haunted and desolate spaces of the edifice, its bleak stone yards, cells and the great panopticon East Wing.

The artists are Danny McCarthy, Brian Connolly, Debbie Guinnane, Helena Walsh, Sandra Johnston, Fergus Byrne, Francis Fay, Katherine Nolan, Pauline Cummins, Ciara McKeon, Dominic Thorpe, Meabh Redmond, Laura McAtackney, Michelle Browne, Sinead O’Donnell and Alastair MacLennan. They will make performances that attempt to remember and re-imagine our past; its conflicts, crises and passions looking into the light of the future. Most of the performances will be of long duration, slowly developing from 10am to 10pm to create residues of action, memory and affect that remember and mirror the durational struggles of the Rising.

The artists will be questioning and investigating the meanings of the 1916 Rising in the light of contemporary understandings - without trying to produce definitive conclusions or resolutions. How can history be secured, known and fully recorded being so mutable and subjective? Every person lives a unique version of their own history and the history of the world. In “Future Histories” we hope to create a collective event of diverse individual perspectives on history and its complex nuances. We aim to complicate and trouble history, to play with it, so we need not be anxious of it anymore.

Áine Phillips