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Festival
Visual Artists' News Sheet | September – October 2021
Laura Fitzgerald, ‘I have made a place’, installation view, 2021; photograph by Jed Niezgoda, courtesy the artist and Crawford Art Gallery.
THE CORK MIDSUMMER Festival, which was established in 2008, has
Protean Worldmaking JENNIFER REDMOND REVIEWS THE VISUAL ART PROGRAMME OF CORK MIDSUMMER FESTIVAL 2021.
flourished in recent years and may now be considered one of the foremost events in the Irish cultural calendar. It delivers both indoor and outdoor events, with online talks and screenings supporting live shows and prompting discussions. There is the ‘Crosstown Drift’, a walking and reading event, while theatre, visual art, music and literature have all used Cork’s urban spaces in innovative ways, from the port to the fort. Cultural events are no longer confined to specific buildings, esoteric audiences or sanctioned times; a more democratic dissemination of culture has evolved. As though reacting to months of isolation, the 2021 programme was versatile, regenerative and thought provoking, signalling perhaps a fluid and more flexible approach to cultural consumption. The Day Crossing-Farm, 2021, was a multi-sensory installation by Marie Brett, commissioned by Cork Midsummer Festival. It was produced with filmmaker Linda Curtin, composer Peter Power and lighting designer Sarah Jane Shiels over a period of two years. Both an in-person and a streamed event, the work examined human trafficking, modern-day slavery and drug farming. The installation took place across 12 rooms in the clandestine location of a derelict city house. Nine screens bombarded the visitor, confronting our privileged existence with the abject reality of enslaved workers. We followed the footsteps, felt the constriction of space, the psychological manipulation, the fear, the entrapment – the slow realisation of the dissolution of sovereignty experienced by trafficked people – as we were lured deeper into the nether world of narcotics. The experience was profound. Jessica Akerman’s work, Cork Caryatids, wove the social history of ‘the Shawlies’1 with the symbolism of caryatids – sculpted female figures serving as pillars, columns, or other supportive architectural features – and the misapplication of administrative digital software, to think about ways in which systems of labour and public spaces may be ‘hacked’. Akerman cre-
