Marianne Keating: An Ciúnas / The Silence

The Showroom presents An Ciúnas / The Silence, a solo exhibition by artist Marianne Keating. As an immersive, three-channel film installation, the exhibition brings together complex intersecting narratives addressing overlooked aspects of Irish migration during Ireland’s colonial rule by Britain, and their enduring legacies in the present.

Building upon the breadth of Keating’s research over the past decade, this new film traces multiple trajectories of migration from Ireland before and after the Great Famine of 1845-52. The work takes as a starting point the hidden histories of the recruitment of Irish indentured labourers to work on plantations as a new labour force in post-abolition Jamaica. Whilst examining the resulting impact of the Irish diaspora in contemporary Jamaican politics, the film focuses in parallel on Irish migration to Britain due to successive eras of economic crisis; concentrating on the generations ‘lost’ since Irish Independence, and continuing to the recent exodus in the 2010s. Keating re-examines and documents these histories through Irish and Jamaican anti-colonial ties.