Anthony Haughey | ‘Manifesto’ | 2016 | HD Video with audio | 18mins 30secs

Since the Arts Council collection was established in the early 1960s there has been a huge growth in the number of artists using the camera to create photographs and make moving image artworks. At this time when we are all looking at an abundance of images online, we wanted to highlight some key works in the collection. There are over 100 lens-based works in the collection, and we’ve selected 14 works that are maybe not as familiar to our audiences. Works in the exhibition were created between 1987 and 2013.

Here, Anthony Haughey, whose work is showcased under the ‘Four Decades of the Lens’ theme, tells us more about the featured artwork and what it means to have his artwork as part of the Arts Council collection. Explore this and more from the Arts Council collection at instagram.com/artscouncilireland/  

Manifesto is about who has the right to be called a citizen. A theme that has been central to my work over many years. Manifesto resonates with historian, Paul Ricoeur’s account of ethical memory and archives. Memory that is “not so much locked into the past, but is concerned with opening the past as a mechanism to release the future” (Ricoeur, 2004). Ordinary people create the epoch of history through their daily struggles but their narratives are ignored by official histories. Manifesto uses a non-linear historical temporality where hidden histories are rescued from obscurity and re-presented to illuminate the present. 

“We need to go back and recover the promise of a real republic that would be built on citizenship and that would reject as outrageous in a republic the kind of radical individualism epitomised in that ugly statement of Michael McDowell's that inequality is needed for the stability of society.” – Michael D Higgins’, final Dáil speech, delivered on 25 January 2011, before his inauguration as President of Ireland.

Manifesto raises important questions for many people living in Ireland today forced to live in “a permanent state of crisis” while multinational corporations insist on generating ever-greater profits. Manifesto invokes historical and contemporary literature to reflect the idealism of the 1916 Proclamation, an important cultural revolution and marked the emergence of Modernism in Ireland. The video is produced through a series of co-written scripts, a collaboration with Donal Nerney, a homeless man, Lauretta Igbonosu, who survived ten years living in Direct Provision with her young family and Laurence McKeown, a former republican hunger striker. Produced in historical and contemporary sites of struggle for political and cultural emancipation, the work reimagines a republic for the common good.

—Anthony Haughey

Since 1962, the Arts Council has been buying art from working artists. The Collection that evolved tells the story of modern and contemporary Irish visual art in a unique and fascinating way. Today the Collection continues to grow and its more than 1,100 paintings, sculptures and other works are on display in public spaces all over Ireland for people to experience and enjoy first hand. You can find out more at: www.artscouncil.emuseum.com