A journey of discovery
Billy Leahy travels to Palestine with an aid worker, to China with a face reader, to Vienna with a disillusioned student and back to contemporary Ireland, all without leaving the borders of the Temple Bar Gallery and Studios
Mark Clare is tackling a big issue. The Belfast-based artist has spent the last year-and-a-half working on Know Thyself, the current exhibition in the Temple Bar Gallery and Studios, which seeks to examine ideas such as the increasing fragmentation of community and cultural and religious dislocation. Clare's body of work, which was realised in various global locations stretching from Palestine to Norway and Hong Kong to Iraq, analyses global migration and its consequences, challenging our perceived notions of society in the process.
By stretching his field of exploration across the world, Clare's exhibition has a definite global feel to it, but his work also confronts the increasing challenges facing modern-day Ireland following its transformation from a nation blighted by emigration to one which has seen a massive increase in immigration in recent times. Social, religious and cultural displacement and problems of integration are now issues on our doorstep and ones that are not only providing ample fuel for political debate, but ones that in fact can shape the future social structure of the country.
But despite the grandiose scale and consequence of his theme, Clare has produced a subtle and low-key body of work, which thankfully manages to avoid coming across as preachy or – even worse – worthy at any point.
One of the first pieces that Clare undertook in the exhibition was a project consisting of documenting the daily routines of international aid volunteers working in politically charged destinations. For this, Clare posted out a disposable camera to aid workers who agreed to take part, asking them to document their routine before returning the camera for him to develop. One of the images taken by a Palestinian-based aid worker was then chosen and made into a postcard, which was sent to over one hundred companies registered on the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange asking for donations to support Clare's project. Unsurprisingly, not a dime was pledged.
The three short video works that take centre stage in the exhibition are perhaps the most relevant to contemporary Ireland with their documentation and exploration of the marginal position of the immigrant in society.
The first piece, Another Day In My Kingdom, is a voyeuristic observation of the overwhelming triteness of working in traditional Norwegian clothes shop in Trondheim, with Clare explaining that the title of the piece relates "to the notion of what we perceive as the idea of Kingdom; the simplest place can be one person's Kingdom". Matrix State examines social practices of Filipina workers in Hong Kong, while the most thought-provoking video, Cure His Heart, documents a Palestinian student conducting what for him is an everyday custom, but one which seems to be highly disjointed from the surrounding plaza in Vienna.
'An answer to a problem, Volume 1', which consists of a wall drawing of a city in Northern Iraq and a publication containing every United Nations' resolution passed on Iraq since 1991, moves Clare's dialogue past the realm of observation and into one of intervention and solution.
The title work of the exhibition, Know Thyself, is the most innovative and interesting video piece and was made on the opening night of Clare's exhibition at the 411 Gallery in Hang Zhou, China. For the work, Clare hired a traditional Chinese "face reader" to examine five Westerners, reading their energies, health and fortune and relationship with the five elements, yin and yang, and the seasons.
The results were then translated into English, highlighting the difficulty of interpreting different beliefs and traditions across cultures and the alteration of meaning through this translation. Unfortunately the piece suffers badly from the acoustics in the gallery: the sound echoes and jumbles to produce a tinny swimming-hall effect that makes the dialogue and message impossible to decipher. And this small criticism can also be translated to the overall essence of the exhibition, where the divergent elements make the final point – at times – slightly too indistinct.