The seminar was opened by Helen O’Malley acknowledging the inherent difficulty of researching Northern Ireland through a colonial lens. While this framing is both necessary and productive, it carries the risk – particularly within the context of the United Kingdom – of re-inscribing Northern Ireland as synonymous with conflict. This reflexive note set a critical tone for the day, foregrounding the ethical and political stakes of such research: how to address histories of violence without reproducing the reductive narratives that have long shaped external perceptions of the North.
The morning session chaired by O’Malley began with Clare Carolin’s presentation on her book, The Deployment of Art: The Imperial War Museum’s Artistic Records Committee, 1968–1982 (2025), which offers a compelling and troubling account of how art was mobilised by the British state. Carolin’s research exposes the ways in which artistic production in Northern Ireland was instrumentalised to support a narrative of ‘friendly peacekeeping’, obscuring the realities of colonial violence.
Carolin presented a photograph of the 1993 IRA Bishopsgate bombing which was used as the lead image for Brilliant! New Art from London, an exhibition curated by Richard Flood for the Walker Art Centre in 1996. The fact the image bore no relation to the exhibition’s featured artists underscored a broader unwillingness to engage critically with the conflict and a flattening of Northern Ireland into a symbolic shorthand for violence and spectacle.
Carolin presented the work of Ken Howard, appointed by the Imperial War Museum as their ‘official artist in Northern Ireland’. Howard’s watercolour sketches, drawings and paintings, produced during multiple trips to Northern Ireland in the 1970s, framed the conflict as a series of ‘sectarian scuffles’ between ‘emotional local factions’.1 Carolin’s research suggests that Howard also functioned as an intelligence gatherer for the British Army, further complicating the supposedly neutral status of the artist-observer. A watercolour depicting Long Kesh prison, shown from a picturesque distance with surveillance towers edited out, exemplified how aesthetic choices actively depoliticised the colonial apparatus.
Discussion following Carolin’s presentation centred on the Imperial War Museum’s resistance to this research. Carolin described encountering institutional self-censorship and attempts to impose a secrecy embargo on her book. The difficulty she faced in publishing images reinforced her assertion that this was ‘a story that was never supposed to be told’, raising the unresolved question that echoed throughout the day: to what extent has the British state or British institutions ever been willing to fully account for the Troubles?
Declan Long’s contribution shifted attention towards specific artists and artist-led practices. Discussing artists such as Cathy Wilkes, Joseph McWilliams, F.E. McWilliam and Brian O’Doherty. Long emphasised the importance of the Art & Research Exchange (ARE), founded in Belfast in 1978 as an outpost of Joseph Beuys’s Free International University. ARE provided a vital platform for photography, film, mixed media and live art, which seeded artist self-organised culture which has long flourished in Northern Ireland.
Long’s reflections on temporality were especially resonant. He observed that much of the work from this period remains undated, suggesting that ‘nobody was thinking about posterity – they were doing what they could in the moment’. These were, he argued, ‘experiments under pressure’.
Isobel Harbison’s presentation further complicated questions of documentation and memory. She presented her project Recording History, an oral history of artist and independent filmmakers active in the north of Ireland from 1968 to 1990, developed in collaboration with IMMA, the Ulster Museum and the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland.2
Harbison described the oral history as an ‘emergency method’ and a ‘counter-narrative strategy’, producing a dataset that resists official accounts. Her reflections on Westminster’s enduring distance from Northern Ireland – illustrated by then Brexit secretary Dominic Raab’s admission that he had not read the Good Friday Agreement while negotiating Brexit – reinforced the sense that political ignorance is not incidental but systemic. It was interesting to contrast Raab’s failings with the method of oral history itself which insists on proximity – on listening, accountability and attention to lived experience.
Harbison noted that Northern Ireland was one of the most intensely photographed regions in Western Europe during the 1970s and 1980s and the interviewees consistently interrogate imperialism and its relationship to media representation. Here it is useful to note that oral testimony functions as a counterpoint to the dominance of photographic and broadcast media, offering alternative modes of remembering that privilege voice over spectacle. Future discussions would benefit from a more sustained focus on the ethical infrastructures that support this work, particularly the role of advisory group which Harbison referred to.
Questions from attendees focused on transnational solidarities, prompting Harbison to critique the framing of the Troubles as a ghettoised conflict between Catholics and Protestants. This narrative, she argued, obscured the colonial roots of the violence.
The afternoon session chaired by Joanne Mullen began with artist Sandra Johnston whose performance and installation work addresses the aftermath of trauma. Reflecting on growing up in a context where neutrality was impossible, Johnston described how fear and self-preservation shaped deep processes of internalisation. Leaving and returning to Northern Ireland emerged as a persistent condition of her practice. Johnston discussed key works and exhibitions including To Kill An Impulse 1994, Broad Daylight 2000, Composure 2004, Disclosures 2011 and The Shadow of a Doubt 2012. She described how several of her artworks employ ‘deliberate reframing of situations through tactics of peripheral vision. Collectively these artworks explore how embodied gestures - both my own and those of other women - inform questions of adversarial territorialisation alongside the persistence of a habituated vulnerability. In essence, how one behaves in such contested environments becomes an acquired and internalised form of ingrained behaviour’.
Mairéad McClean’s work deals with, in her own words, ‘fragments… and the in-between place where history hasn’t settled, and my body still remembers’. McClean showed excerpts of several of her works including No More 2013, Acts of Memory 2024 and Cineland Zoom 2025. Her work draws on personal family histories, British rule in Ireland, archives and official records, oral histories, internment, imprisonment and solidarity movements. She continued this exploration of power and memory, discussing her work on the ‘performance of authority and the choreography of power’ and ‘how the state records us systematically, and when they don’t we disappear or don’t exist’.
Dr Alessia Cargnelli concluded the session with a discussion of her work as part of Array Collective, foregrounding activism around reproductive rights and the repeal of the Eighth Amendment. She emphasised that for the collective, the creation of social space and peer support preceded the production of art, with humour functioning as a survival strategy in the face of bleak realities. Cargnelli read an excerpt of writing from Dublin-based writer Una Mullally who Array have worked with in the past in which she included the imaginative provocation – ‘What if Ireland is actually trans, what if it is a trans state. What if the North is non-binary, what if it came out?’ This offered a powerful framework for rethinking Northern Irish identity beyond fixed binaries, a point of relevance when considered in relation to the question of a united Ireland.
Discussion turned to the prolonged suspension of Stormont, the seat of the Northern Ireland Assembly and the Executive, the absence of abortion services despite legalisation of abortion in Northern Ireland and the broader dereliction of duty by Westminster.3 The lack of a commercial art market in Northern Ireland was noted as enabling experimental practices.
As the seminar drew to a close the question of what healing might look like emerged but required more time to resolve. Johnston’s observation that younger generations may experience a more safe and celebratory relationship to identity suggested an important generational shift. Equally the seminar’s stated ambition to engage global anti-colonial struggles while referenced perhaps required another session to explore in depth. As a whole the seminar established a vital foundation for research into the relationship between art production in Ireland as it intersects with British colonialism.
Biographies
Dr Alessia Cargnelli is a Belfast-based artist and researcher, and currently a Research Ireland Post-doctoral fellow at the National College of Art and Design and the Irish Museum of Modern Art. Alessia moved to Belfast in 2016 to work as co-director of Catalyst Arts. She holds a PhD from the Belfast School of Art where she focused on Irish feminist-led women-artists’ advocacy groups and she was post-doctoral researcher at the National Irish Visual Arts Library. Cargnelli is co-founder of Soft Fiction Projects and a member of Array Collective, a group of 11 artists rooted in Belfast, who were awarded the Turner Prize in 2021.
Dr Clare Carolin is a contemporary art historian, curator and writer specialised in the intersection of art with visual activism and militarised force. Her current research investigates the role of images in the fight for civil human rights in the north of Ireland and Black America (1960–80). Her monograph The Deployment of Art: The Imperial War Museum’s Artistic Records Committee, 1968–1982 (2025) explores art’s use as an instrument of war during the Troubles and the 1982 Falklands war, combining contemporary art history, security, intelligence and media studies. She is Senior Lecturer in Art and Public Engagement at King’s College London.
Dr Isobel Harbison is an Irish art historian and writer, and Senior Lecturer at Goldsmiths, University of London. Her first book, Performing Image, was published by MIT Press in 2019. Her second book, a history of the world’s most famous sign, in situ and in circulation, is forthcoming with Manchester University Press. From 2025–2026, Harbison is Research Associate at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, working with Ulster Museum and the Public Records Office of Northern Ireland to deliver Recording History, an oral history of artist and independent filmmakers active in the north of Ireland from 1968 to 1990.
Sandra Johnston is a Northern Irish artist who uses performance and installation to explore the aftermath of trauma, through acts of commemoration as forms of testimony and empathetic encounter. Johnston is course leader of the BxNU MFA at Northumbria University and co-founder of collectives including Catalyst Arts and Bbeyond. In 2013, Johnston published the PhD research project Beyond Reasonable Doubt: An Investigation into Concepts of Doubt, Risk and Testimony Explored Through Consideration of Performance Art Processes in Relation to Systems of Legal Justice.
Dr Declan Long is Head of Doctoral Studies and Co-Director of MA/MFA Art in the Contemporary World at the National College of Art & Design, Dublin, Ireland. He writes regularly on contemporary art and related subjects for a range of publications including Artforum International and Source Photographic Review. He is the author of Ghost-Haunted Land: Contemporary Art and Post-Troubles Northern Ireland (2017), an in-depth analysis of art made in response to changing conditions in the north of Ireland during the two decades following the 1998 Good Friday Agreement.
Mairéad McClean is a Northern Irish artist-filmmaker exploring memory, historical aftermaths and how lived experience is shaped by power and place. She won the inaugural MAC International Art Prize for No More 2013, a work on the legacy of internment and its reverberations. Her 16mm film Acts of Memory 2024 examines matters of record, archival loss and inherited memory. A former Beyond 2022 artist-in-residence at Trinity College Dublin, her work is in the collections of Irish Museum of Modern Art and the Arts Councils of Ireland and Northern Ireland.
Johanne Mullan is Curator of Collections at Irish Museum of Modern Art, curatorial projects include Patricia Hurl: Irish Gothic, 2023–5, Protest and Conflict: The Narrow Gate of the Here and Now, 2021–2, From the Edge to the Centre: IMMA Archive 1990s, 2020, IMMA Collection: Freud Project Gaze, 2018–9 and Willie Doherty – Remains, Art Sonje Center, Seoul, 2017. She chaired IMMA’s Self Determination Programme, 2021–3 was lead curator of commissioned works for the exhibition Self-Determination, A Global Perspective, 2023–4 and is co-lead curator of Technologies of Peace: Art and Transition in Contemporary Europe, 2025–9. Her current research explores contested histories and overlooked narratives, with a focus on acquiring live performance and artist archives.
Helen O’Malley is Curator of International Art at Tate Modern Gallery in London, where she is responsible for developing exhibitions, collection displays and new commissions, with a special focus on socially engaged, collaborative and participatory practices. Past projects include Máret Ánne Sara: Goavve-Geabbil, 2025–6, Gathering Ground, 2026, Abbas Zahedi: Begin Again, 2025, Cecilia Vicuna: Brain Forest Quipu, 2022–3, Topher Campbell: My rukus! Heart, 2024–5 and Richard Bell: Embassy, 2023. O’Malley also works with the Tate Neighbours, who are a collective of local people formed in 2018 as part of Tania Bruguera: 10,148,451. The group guides Tate Modern’s continuing development as a useful and reciprocal space within the local community.