All Things Being Equal - The Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin: Video installation

All Things Being Equal is a seamlessly looped video that forms part of a larger body of work exploring the notion of suspended trauma; the idea that dramatic/traumatic incidents from the past are continually repeated and replayed, no longer just as personal memories but also vicariously through the ever expanding shared experience of mass media depiction. In both, the document is detached from its original time and place. It perpetually hangs in the conscience, seemingly without conclusion. All Things Being Equal explores a more intimate event, depicting the repetitive movements of a figure in confinement, beleaguered by water. Visually, All Things Being Equal is stripped bare, referencing the sparse aesthetic of Samuel Beckett, where naming and style detract from the essential, and negate the potential to manipulate the flow of narrative time. For this purpose, in this work, the context is without reference, gender unknown and identity removed as the head is shaved. Responding to Beckett’s writings about the use of camera and screen to embody ways to perceive and be perceived, All Things Being Equal deploys the notion of ‘intrusive camera’ in video portraiture and large-format screening.

All Things Being Equal was selected for presentation at the Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA) to coincide with the scholastic events occurring as part of the Beckett Summer School in Dublin, notabley a talk by author, curator and artist Derval Tubridy entitled The Unthought and The Harrowing: Samuel Beckett’s Necessary Art