The Other Side? – Borderlands in Contemporary Irish Art

Kathy Prendergast, BLACK MAP SERIES (Bulgaria), 2010, ink on printed map, 94.4 x 131.7 cm (Detail)

By Anne Mager:

Anne Mager is a curator and arts manager living in Ireland and Germany, and the curator of "The Other Side - Borderlands in Contemporary Irish Art", which runs at the Dortmunder U until March 2020. We are extremely pleased and proud to be able to publish her introductory speech from the exhibition opening in December:

Until recently, I felt that I was able to count myself among a lucky generation that in childhood and adolescence saw the disappearance of more and more borders: not only the Berlin Wall in the autumn of 1989, but also fewer and fewer border controls that were interrupting vacation trips by family car to Belgium, France, Spain and other countries in the eighties and early nineties. In retrospect, and from the perspective of December 2019, it seems almost naive that, like many others, I naturally assumed that this was the direction in which Europe will continue to steer; that the removal of borders, customs duties and the further dissolution of the internal barriers of the EU is something positive and that newly opened borders should remain open. How sobering, no, how shocking it is to finally understand, a week after the disastrous UK elections, that many people do not share the same sentiment.

I moved to Ireland a little over three years ago, to the small town of Dundalk located exactly halfway between Belfast and Dublin, two capitals in two countries on the small island of Ireland and only two hours by car or train from each other. The border between the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland runs exactly halfway across this route, just a few kilometers north of Dundalk. Anyone crossing this border today is often surprised by what cannot be seen: there are no border guards, no security checks or large warning signs and no passport controls on the train either.

In many places one is not really sure where the border runs at all. The head of the regional Arts Council once told me that he crosses the border around seven times when he drives his daughter to her weekly ballet class. Of course, this was not always the case and until the nineties this section of the border, idyllically situated in the Cooley Mountains and in the middle of a fjord, the Carlingford Lough, was under strict military surveillance. Numerous attacks took place here and anyone who's car broke down in the border strip in the 1980s was at risk of having it being blown up by British security forces, according to the official security rules in place back then.

The Irish border opened with the Good Friday Agreement in 1998. The de facto arrangement to date: the border is still legally there, but in fact it does not hinder any traffic in both directions. It is not there and yet it exists. And even three years after the first Brexit negotiations, there is still no way of knowing exactly what will happen to what exists de jure and which is de facto hardly noticeable. But it is also a fact that a new EU external border will soon run here.

This will mean much more than inconvenience due to passport controls and more complicated customs regulations – which may also affect the transportation of this exhibition back to Dublin, London and Newry.

The conflict and also the peace in Northern Ireland are not only a complex but also a very shaky affair, and the shadows of the past have buried themselves deeply in cities like Derry and Belfast. As co-director of a Belfast exhibition space and as an somewhat outsider, I am always amazed at the contradiction between this "not there and yet existing": of course there is peace and it doesn't really matter in everyday life whether you are Protestant or Catholic. And still, the so-called Peace Walls, which are higher than the Berlin Wall ever was, are still standing, separating Catholic and Protestant districts and neighbourhoods. Finding my way around the city when I started working here, it was not uncommon for Google Maps to guide me through streets at night where I suddenly found myself in front of the locked gates of these walls that had been open all day. On official forms, funding applications and surveys, you are always asked to which community and confession you yourself or e.g. the exhibition visitors belong, just to make sure that this sensitive balance can be maintained. It is a fragile peace, in many places the conflict is still bubbling to the surface and the violent past has confusing and often contradictory social consequences, which I – like many others – still try to understand.

But what other form of expression is better suited to deal with complexity and contradictions than art? In my curatorial work and in this exhibition in particular, it is very important to me to use artistic positions not as an illustration of a topic or concept, but rather as an opportunity to approach the complex, the confusing, the unseen and overlooked, and at best to change perspectives.

The first position you will encounter in the exhibition is that of Enda Bowe. In Love’s Fire Song, he photographed young people on both sides of the Peace Walls before and during the symbolic, politically charged annual bonfires. The artist deliberately refrained from depicting political symbols or overly clear classification criteria. Rather, his work is about the ordinary and everyday, about what connects us, but also about how we shape future generations.

The question of how to deal with conflict and terror across generations also plays a major role in Willie Doherty's works. As in many of his other works, the setting for the video installation “Remains” shown here is his hometown Derry, also a border town, which has gained a sad reputation as the site of the Blood Sunday massacre 1972. Willie investigates the relationship between landscape and memory across generations and, unfortunately based on true facts, tells the story of a father who is supposed to bring his son and nephew to a site where both are to undergo kneekapping, a punishment method of the Provisional IRA, which is still in use today and which the narrator, the father, had already suffered before.

Sean Hillen brings together the horrors of the so-called Troubles, different levels of time and reality, Irish landscape and pop culture motifs in a completely different narrative and with a completely different, very analogue technique. In his delicate collages, he combines his own documentary images of the conflict with utopian imagery, often in a bizarre and yet irritatingly humorous way.

Kathy Prendergast's cartographic works are also miraculously utopian and poetic. Something wondrous happens when she paints over every-day street maps with black ink for her Black Maps series: she shows in a very reduced but all the more vivid way what happens when we overcome borders. Through artistic elimination and transformation, she succeeds in overcoming power structures and clarifying the subjectivity of maps and subtly questions topics such as identity and location.

This exhibition takes the Irish border as a starting point to reflect on political conflicts and social separation. It was therefore all the more important to open up the view beyond national borders. And that is exactly what Jesse Jones does in her video work "The Other North" from 2013, in which she connects the traumas of Northern Irish and South Koreans in an haunting way. It is a very special honour for me to show this work which connects two divided countries here in Germany, in the thirtieth year of reunification.

Dragana Jurisic’s book and photo project YU: The Lost Country also takes us beyond national borders. The Serbian-Croatian photographer, who lives in Dublin, went on a photographic search for traces of her homeland, a country that no longer exists, and reminds us of how fragile European peace can be.

It is precisely this change of perspective, this view of the supposedly "other" that the exhibition "The Other Side" would like to invite you to. To show that there are more similarities than differences both on a political and on an individual, personal level. I would like to end with a quote from John Hume, who received the 1998 Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts in the Irish peace process. Enda Bowe kindly brought the opening sentence of the following quote to the exhibition:

“Difference is the essence of humanity. Difference is an accident of birth, and it should therefore never be the source of hatred or conflict. Therein lies a most fundamental principle of peace: respect for diversity.”

Exhibition website

The Library: Hard Border – Walking Through a Century of Irish Partition, by Darach MacDonald

Read by Marcel Krueger:

The Automobile Associaton of Ireland's 1962 handbook contains six pages of guidance for people planning to cross the border between the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland. There are 18 approved roads with customs posts, and the AA warns that vehicles were liable for customs duty and purchase tax upon entering Northern Ireland, requiring motorists to 'lodge large sums of money at the frontier' or avoid doing so by providing a so-called 'triptyque' passbook for stamping at frontier crossings. The border section closes with a warning: motorists crossing on unapproved roads are 'liable to very severe penalties, including confiscation of [their] car.' Customs post also only had limited opening hours and late-night crossings incurred an additional fee of 2 shillings, usually paid in advance.

The slow train wreck of Brexit and the connected question of the future of the only land border between the European Union and the UK has in recent years increased the interest in the history of Irish partition and the 499 km-long frontier between the Republic and Northern Ireland. Countless TV and print reports have investigated it, the border now has its own darkly funny Twitter account, and there has been a loose series of books about the border as well, first and foremost Garett Carr's 'The Rule of Land' (2017), which follows the author's trek from Carlingford Lough along the border to Lough Foyle. Darach MacDonald's 'Hard Border' is the latest addition to the loose canon of Irish border books, but this one zooms in a bit deeper than most. Despite the flashy cover which seems to indicate a more political look at the potential of a 'hard' border, instead this is a deeply personal look at the history of the border, and 'hard' here could also mean 'deadly'.

MacDonald is a veteran journalist hailing from Clones in County Monaghan, and has written extensively about his home country and the border, most recently in ' Blood & Thunder: Inside an Ulster Protestant Band' (2010). For this later border-book, he walked the 75-kilometer route of the now-defunct Ulster Canal, which was completed in 1842 to link Lough Neagh to the Erne system but proved unsuccessful, was outstripped by the railways and the subsequent partition of Ireland and finally closed in 1932. Even though there are plans to develop a greenway along its banks, to date most of it is neglected and overgrown, which forces MacDonald through dense undergrowth and on many detours – which is almost synonymous for the tangled history of the Irish border which he encounters. Following the canal from Castle Saunderson to the Moy, the author explores both the drumlin landscape and the history of the last 100 years in the border heartlands, where five counties meet: Cavan and Monaghan in the Republic and Fermanagh, Tyrone and Armagh in Northern Ireland. Here, the border shifts and snakes around villages and roads, forming loops that almost become enclaves and exclaves (and will cause many a Brexit headache): for example, there are eight roads in and out Clones in Monaghan – five of which run into Fermanagh.

Walking this convoluted border give MacDonald the chance to dive deep into the political reasons behind partition and also to chart the violence that spilled across the border from both sides: from the Irish Civil War over the so-called border campaign of the IRA in the 1950s to the horrors of the Northern Ireland conflict between 1969 and 1998. And it is the latter which results in the strongest parts of the book, when MacDonald talks about the horrendous tit-for-tat killings that he witnessed, often perpetrated by neighbours and members of the same community:

The terror persisted and lapped to and fro across the border, as with the abduction and murder of Ross Hearst of Middletown in 1980. The 52-year old father of five was taken at gunpoint outside a friend's house in Tullylush, back near where the Monaghan Mushrooms plant stands today. His corpse with four bullet wounds was dumped at Wards Cross, a short distance away on the border. [...] Seamus Soroghan of Monaghan town was later convicted of the murder. Yet no sentence could allay the trauma of the Hearst family, which at the time of the father's death was still mourning the 1977 killing of his daughter Margaret Ann Hearst, a 24-year-old-single mother of a 3-year-old child, and part-time soldier in the UDR [Ulster Defence Regiment].

As an outsider from Germany, the Irish border and its effect on the communities it historically divided and still divides often reminds me of the Berlin Wall, which had similar seemingly random nooks and crannies that meant division and death for their inhabitants. There is the 'Entenschnabel', the Duck's Bill in Glienicke/Nordbahn, where a GDR neighbourhood along one street was enclosed by West Berlin on three sides, or the Eiskeller, where three West Berlin farmer families could only get to the city along a small road four metres wide and 800 meters long. And while the Irish Border was not as tightly sealed as the Berlin one, it was at least as deadly and meant similar arrangements for those affected by it. At the height of the Troubles, the five roads out of Clones into the North were closed, and just a single main route across the border remained open in the area, and any traffic wishing to pass had to go through a full military checkpoint, often resulting in long delays - and at the height of the IRA’s campaign in the 1970s and 80s most smaller lanes leading from that main road across the border were spiked, blocked with concrete blocks or blown up by the British Army.

There's a lot of fighting and killing in this book, but this is no over-proportionate for the slice of Irish landscape and history it analyses – the terror, after all, was real. This is not a lighthearted romp, but also not a hopeless one. There's plenty of positive stories, like the history of the Leslie family of Glaslough and their (in)famous parties, or the stories of local entrepreneurship (like the aforementioned mushroom plant) that were made possible by the opening of the border after the Good Friday Agreement 1999. MacDonald is apprehensive about the potential impacts of Brexit, and rightly so, as his fine mix of memoir and history in 'Hard Border' properly put the border and its effect on the local communities into perspective. The only thing lacking is a detailed map, which would make it easy for those encountering the pitfalls of the Irish border for the first time to trace its weird loops – and a timeline would also have helped.

But otherwise, this is a fine journey through the history of the Irish border heartlands, filled with affrays, danger, hope, a soviet in the Monaghan Lunatic Asylum and Oscar Wilde's sisters, burning to death on Halloween. I can thoroughly recommend it to both newcomers to the Irish border as well as veteran border writers and walkers. And especially to Jacob Rees-Mogg.

Hard Border is published by New Island and is available through their website or from any independent bookshop.