The Irish face is the culmination of Wasser’s artist residency at Tate Library, a collaborative exchange organised with Ireland’s Askeaton Contemporary Arts during 2025. Wasser’s research initially asks how national identity, and his own Irishness, has and continues to be mediated through systems of classification and categorisation, and what kinds of alternative evocations can still emerge. Drawing from narratives and subjects such as Derry’s famed Orchard Gallery, Tate Britain’s location on the former site of Millbank Penitentiary, the design lineage of the library itself, or representations of Irish physiognomy and history as seen in Dublin’s National Gallery, Wasser creates a counter taxonomy of knowledge, speculating where potential blind spots might lie.
Presented as a gradually unfolding presence, an open rehearsal will take place at Tate's Reading Rooms during the afternoon, alongside a display of artefacts and ephemera key to Wasser’s research. Acknowledging a desire to ‘act and read out loud’ inside the typically silent spaces of the library, Wasser will gather and theatrically enact scripted writings, monologues and archival quotations that evoke entangled narratives of identity and institutional authority.
