Artist’s Talk Tuesday 24 March at 2pm

Anthony Haughey is an artist who explores contested territories in Ireland and Europe. In a premier for Limerick City Gallery of Art, Haughey returned to Bosnia to make a new film. UNresolved reflects on the twentieth anniversary of genocide in Srebrenica. Haughey presents a haunting memorial to the victims of the Bosnian war of 1992-95. The title relates to the UN Security Resolution 819, passed on the 16th April 1993 declaring Srebrenica as a ‘safe’ area for Muslim refugees – the prelude to what was the largest act of genocide in Europe since the holocaust. Following Haughey’s earlier work in Bosnia, between 1998-2002, he gained exclusive access to buildings and atrocity sites in Serb controlled territory, areas that have hitherto been off limits. Breaking the silence of this film is a recording of eyewitness accounts of massacre victims collated from archives such as Human Rights Watch and also directly from people encountered on research visits to Bosnia, with accounts of resistance and survival, testimonies from young Dutch soldiers who were serving in Srebrenica and conflicting accounts from UN personnel and Serb military commanders. The film explores ideological and political narratives informing this emerging and contested history. As Walter Benjamin stated, ‘articulating the past historically does not mean recognizing it ‘the way it really was.’ It means appropriating a memory as it flashes up in a moment of danger’ (1990).

Also for the first time in Limerick Haughey presents his acclaimed Settlement series, for this work he photographed ‘ghost estates’, a manifestation of the spectacular collapse of Ireland’s Celtic Tiger economy. These ‘ruins’ are a symbol of failed economic and social strategies implemented by government policies of the early twenty-first century. Haughey’s unsettling images attract and repel in equal measure, evoking a ‘dystopian sublime’. Not only does he capture iconic images of this time of crisis, he also probes the fallout and legacy that followed. His photographs of ghost estates are recast as eerie ‘monuments’ – testament to the end of Ireland’s gold rush and the resulting cost of unregulated growth and institutionalised speculation. At this moment of fragile economic recovery, ‘Settlement is a positive political response to a world of negative equity’.

Exhibition curated by Helen Carey, Director of Fire Station Artists Studios, Dublin