Le ceol is an exhibition of artists engaging with languages impacted by colonial contexts, each using song and vocality as a primary place from which language resists. In this exhibition, the voice is a site of performance, agency, silences and confusions; difficult to grasp (yet easy to swallow); both inside and outside the body at the same time; as intangible as it is socially and politically weighty. Across artworks by 8 artists and collaborators, voice is given form as song, painting, performance, print, sculpture and film.

This exhibition starts from the question of individual and collective responsibility to language. Its title is drawn from the line “go mbeadh na fallaí ramhar le ceol” (that the walls might burst with music) by contemporary Irish poet Aifric Mac Aodha, referring to the Irish practice of burying horse skulls under the floorboards of houses and dance halls to increase the sonic resonance of the room. This image becomes analogy for stories and languages temporarily buried, which emerge loudly to resonate into the future.

Voice quite literally refers to, speaks to, or enacts performativity and action: it can name things, it can protest, it can preserve, it can demur. Each artist in the exhibition has engaged with ancestral language and vocal practice as a means of celebrating, re-learning, connecting and advocating for the knowledges held in non-dominant languages, as a means of critically reimagining a future built on this embodied knowledge.

Curated by Jacqui Shelton.

Image: Brigid press, courtesy Alice Heyward and Oisín Ó Manacháin/Monaghan. Photo: Agustín Farias