In the Shadow of the State by Sarah Browne and Jesse Jones
‘The Touching Contract’, 2016
Graphic artwork by Sarah Browne, Jesse Jones and Miriam O'Connor

Throughout 2016, artists Sarah Browne and Jesse Jones have been developing In the Shadow of the State across Ireland and the UK. The project investigates the role of the nation state in the regulation of the female body, tracking the everyday institutions of the state, including the home itself. 

The next iteration of the project The Touching Contract will explore the qualities of how we encounter the touch of the State every day, with and without consent. Staged in the Pillar Room of the Rotunda Hospital, the first lying-in hospital in the British Isles, The Touching Contract examines the intimate gesture of touch as a site of contact with the State through an immersive performance work. 

Engaging with the audience directly, The Touching Contract proposes a kind of hypersensitivity to touch, as a way of dramatizing usually unfelt political realities. The performance will feature a newly commissioned soundscape by Alma Kelliher, and a legal score developed by the artists with legal academic and activist Mairead Enright. 

This event follows on from Of Milk and Marble, the first public performance of the project staged in Derry in February. In July, Browne and Jones presented The Truncheon and the Speculum, a live ‘telefeminist’ broadcast from Liverpool at part of the Liverpool Biennial. The final public event in the series will take place in London in December 2016.

Sarah Browne and Jesse Jones

Sarah Browne and Jesse Jones are both based in Dublin and studied at the National College of Art and Design. Their collaboration, as a feminist practice, brings together mutual concerns. They have each made numerous works within and outside gallery spaces, and have extensive experience working in collaborative contexts and through public art commissions. Their exhibitions, films and public projects have been produced on a national and an international level, for institutions such as Project Arts Centre, the Irish Museum of Modern Art, the Istanbul Biennale, Artsonje Seoul, the Daimler Art Collection and the Irish Pavilion at the Venice Biennale.

←Return to the Ireland 2016 page