This interactive virtual reality installation seeks to explore the hegemonic and bio political power
and control that was exerted over women and children under the guise of moral and religious
supremacy in Ireland. The female body entered a machinery of disciplinary power which aim
was to break it down and re arrange it, through separation of mother from child, illegal
adoptions, unlawful incarceration, and psychological and sometimes physical violence. In 2016
a mass unmarked grave was unearthed at a former site of one of these institutions and with it
our ability to keep buried our complicity as a nation. Survivors of these institutions still struggle
to reveal the truth and to obtain acknowledgment for acts committed against them in our name.
This work hopes to challenge our inertia through an experiential virtual reality work that
collapses everything that appears solid. The viewer enters into a world that is in mourning,
where power over the body is threatened, provoking internal anxieties of loss of control at what
was and still is the ultimate site of contention, the body.

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http://nationalsculpturefactory.com/programme/current/the-ground-opened-up/

 

 

 15th –  17th Nov 2017
Wandesford Quay Gallery