Justine McDonnell

Je suis l’un, tu es l’autre. Ou le contraire. Nos désirs se rencontrent. Déjà c’est un effort que de les démêler.

I’m this one; you’re that one. Or the contrary. Our desires meet. It’s hard to disentangle them.

-Claude Cahun

As an act of response to The Otolith Group exhibition, XENOGENESIS, at IMMA, Justine McDonnell’s video SHE takes its title from a poem written by Rabindranath Tagore.

Building a composition of movement through images and sound, performing using her own voice - historical, fictional and autobiographical narratives are fused together in a new scripted score, giving rise to the complexities and power structures contained within the speech act.

Within this new vocal composition voices of the “other” come to the fore inviting the viewer to reflect on what they are looking ‘for’ rather than ‘at’.

https://imma.ie/whats-on/alien-embodiments-a-critical-reflection/

https://vimeo.com/826908629

Within her live performance The Double Self McDonnell moves through a series of scripted scores. Drawing upon autobiographical, fictional and related accounts of historical events she consciously embodies an act of refusal. Performing using her own voice, composed across multiple positions, the voice gathers in moments of silence, breaths and a chorus of chants.

https://www.eventbrite.ie/e/the-double-self-dlr-lexicon-gallery-tickets-395952734287?aff=ebdsoporgprofile

-It’s galling to be able to give only what you have, only what you are. But….Even if you cover and re-cover yourself with masks, even if you paint them, it may be that you simply increase the resemblance, and accentuate the imperfections of the hidden face….

-Claude Cahun.

‘SHE’ an ongoing photographic series exploring identity and the hidden ‘self’ using a polaroid camera and yellow and black film.

“Under this mask, another mask. I will never be finished removing all these faces.”

- Claude Cahun.

Engaged with an ongoing dialogue with multiplicity, identity and exploration of the “self” Scores for Other was one of a series of monologues developed from a photographic series of self-portraits with a polaroid camera.

Written and performed using cut-up techniques the audio features fragments of poetry, autobiography and music lyrics.

Scores for Other takes place in a dark space on a black stage illuminated by two beams of light. As if on trial, the voice speaks through a scripted monologue where She appears to be listening or confronting a voice unheard and unseen by the audience.

This work and research was produced and presented over a period of three months at Het Wilde Weten, Rotterdam.

Listen Here-

https://soundcloud.com/justine-mcdonnell/justine-scoresforother?si=b412c76f443f4527811adc755d21a078

LIVE ART AND PERFORMANCE

Interruptions: Sounds

06.08.21 - 10.09.21 Holden Gallery, Manchester

Kp Culver, Rowland Hill, Ashley Holmes, Justine McDonnell, Eye Suriyanon, Keisha Thompson and Raz Ullah

'Interruptions: Sounds' is a collection of new audio works by seven artists, spanning spoken word, ambient sound and musical tracks. The collection is available as a free, downloadable album, enabling listeners to experience the work away from digital screens, and encouraging time spent outdoors. All the tracks are best experienced with headphones.

How to Listen or Download

The tracks can be played on SoundCloud or downloaded as .wav files in a zip archive (217MB).

https://www.holdengallery.mmu.ac.uk/2021/interruptions-sounds/

https://soundcloud.com/holdengallery/sets/interruptions-sounds

The Lab Gallery presents Scaling the Void . Live performance: Thursday 17th October, 6.45-7.45pm.

https://visualartists.ie/events/scaling-the-void-justine-mcdonnell-at-the-lab-gallery-dublin/

In her new live work ‘Scaling the Void’ McDonnell disrupts narrative conventions through a series of densely interwoven narrative units accentuating different points of encounter. She moves through a series of imagined responses to a conversation that is yet to occur. Drawing upon autobiographical notations and related accounts of historical events, McDonnell consciously embodies an act of refusal. 

McDonnell’s practice to date has been concerned with subjects such as: the curated construction of the self; the decisions we make in regards to self-editing; the commonly held belief in the authenticity of autobiography and social histories; and the complicity of the state in perpetuating acceptable narratives in the construction of social norms. She works across a range of media including forms of performance, sound, video installation and text works. 

Accentuating the physicality of the voice, her practice employ’s the female voice to challenge the framework of gendered language. With reference to the shift in the role of the viewer to that of co-author, McDonnell acknowledges the voice as having a primary agency in a dialectical exchange. In her work the voice is not simply a medium for communication, it has political currency in its materiality and has use beyond communication. 

My video work Narrative Against Itself , screened as part of Stabilimento Ostiense, an exhibition of video art on the walls of the buildings of the Ostiense District, Rome.

Organised by Zaelia Bishop and Emanuele Napolitano, the project was born from the need to create a form of artistic aggregation during quarantine established in February 2020. The ban on gathering in galleries and museums has therefore fuelled the urgent need to create an exchange platform where the public could enjoy the works of national and international artists from home.

Website: https://stabilimentostiense.wixsite.com/ostiense

Listen Here:

https://soundcloud.app.goo.gl/ZUh4AUMfnqraipPEA

https://vimeo.com/663976687

A composition of she 

https://soundcloud.app.goo.gl/ZUh4AUMfnqraipPEAhttps://vimeo.com/663976687Justine McDonnell

19.07.18 – 25.08.18

The Golden Thread Gallery is delighted to present A Composition of she a solo exhibition by Justine McDonnell. The show is delivered in partnership with the Flax Art Studios Graduate Residence Award 2017 in the Golden Thread Gallery’s project space.

This new work presented in the Project Space at Golden Thread Gallery sees a shift in McDonnell’s practice towards a more staged encounter with her audio work. Notions around concealment and revelation positioning the viewer as co-author, prompting the creation of new, individualised narratives. The audio is composed across four channels, choreographed specifically to create new sensory experiences around the space. In response to this new work, writer and curator Manuela Pacella, based in Rome, has provided a collaborative text as part of the exhibition that is featured within the show.

The exhibition, reviewed in the ‘Emerging Artists’ section of the Visual Artists Ireland News sheet, Autumn edition, 2018.

https://visualartistsireland.com/justine-mcdonnell-a-composition-of-she

Thu 7th March - Sat 20th April
All Day

Digital Arts Studios – Annual Review Exhibition

Selected by Daria Jelonek and Simon Poulter the show will include work by:

Edy Fung
Duncan Herd
Justine McDonnell
Paul Mulgrew
EL Putnam
Peter Richards

We are delighted to present this exciting body of work, which negotiates the performative, sculptural, textual and videographic. For more information on the individual artists please visit https://www.digitalartsstudios.com/artists. The exhibition will take place in the Golden Thread Gallery’s Project Space in Belfast and will run from Thursday the 7th of March to the 20th April 2019. There will be an opening reception on Thursday the 7th March from 6pm.

Exhibition supported by the Arts Council of Northern Ireland.

During my residency at DAS I focused on how sound and the physicality of the voice can direct the viewer’s construction of new narratives in relation to the use of: autobiography; narration; repetition; and fragmentation. 

I employ the female voice in disciplined and formal structures and have combined the implied authenticity of autobiographical representation with the imagined of fictional narratives.

I was drawn to Manovich’s assertion that ‘Many new media objects do not tell stories; they do not have a beginning or end; in fact, they do not have any development, thematically, formally, or otherwise that would organise their elements into a sequence’. 

 ‘You said it has to be this way’ explores the physical relationship with the screen, in particular, the simultaneous act of reading and listening. The combination of text on screen and the delivery of audio through headphones may challenge what the viewer hears and sees, providing new possibilities of contradicting what is conveyed through the voice, creating new order and meaning.

“The relation between what we see and what we know is never settled”

                                                                                                                                       John Berger, Ways of Seeing

Through my experience of being a British Council Research Fellow at the British Pavilion during the Venice Biennale 2017, I created a project in response to my encounter with three national pavilions. My attention focused on James Richards, Music for the gift at the Welsh pavilion, Xavier Veilhan, Studio Venezia at the French pavilion and Anne Imhof, Faust at the German pavilion. Common to each of the displays was the significance of sound, staging and a sense of absence that played in the work.

The way in which I encountered the artwork at each pavilion was framed by the nature of its installation enacted by its choreography and the presence of sound. Studio Venezia featured random acts of enactment, Faust featured scheduled acts of enactment and Music for the gift featured a repetitious act of enactment. The variations in enactment led to me assuming three different positions from which to respond, adopting multiple identities as character, performer and author. The memories that were activated by each encounter were interweaved into an enquiry about space, place and subject. My project has taken the form of a paired image and written response for each encounter, questioning how the staging and dynamic interplay of both, may shape the experience of another in the present. 

Exhibited: RAW Labs, London, E16 2QJ

'Narrative Against Itself' 2017 featured as part of 'We Speak Silent' Curated by Clare Gormley. 

WE SPEAK SILENT

Nicoline van Harskamp | Justine McDonnell | Tom Varley | Hannah Weiner With a performance by HIVE Choir

Curated by Clare Gormley

In this work I respond to the film We Speak Silent (1975) written and performed by Avant-Garde & American poet Hannah Weiner. Composing fictional dialogue scripts, I assume the position of Hannah in conversation with her former self whilst situating myself as the narrator. In some moments, the failings of language are made explicit, speech becomes broken, words malfunction, meaning is lost or hidden. The work was installed in the gallery’s shopfront window space, with a black theatre curtain backdrop. The Tannoy speakers installed on the buildings external wall played out on to the street to test and rupture an everyday encounter with a public space.

https://www.pssquared.org/projects/we-speak-silent

truth she forbids 2017, comprised of a looped, three channel audio installation, accentuating different points of encounter within a choreographed sequence. Three black speakers, sat on a dark grey carpet, in a staged space that was created with black, sound dampening theatre curtain. Opposite the entrance of the space, a section of the wall was painted black. Three textual works in multiples were presented on black shelves, providing the viewer with extracts of the audio recordings to take away.  

This work was presented in the MFA studios, Belfast School of Art, 2017. 

if this mouth could open, 2017 was performed as part of Transmit, Platform Arts, Belfast. This work consists of one performer and four microphone stands. On each music stand sat a script for the performer to enact. A loop pedal and a vocoder were present at two of the microphones with the loop providing constant layering and backing rhythm, the vocoder was set to deepen the voice into a masculine tone. With the physicality of the voice as a main focus, the performer moved in a choreographed sequence from one script to the next. Each text was read differently, shifting in volume and pace through repetition. The duration of the performance was 30 minutes. 

I've got a message to give to you, 2016 was performed in Pollen Studios, Belfast and the Belfast International Performance Festival.

The performance comprises of five microphones and stands, two performers and five scripted texts. With a focus on the role sound plays in the act of speech, each script consisted of fragmented words and sentences, with consistency interrupted by music symbols or full stops. Each performer, moved from each microphone to enact the script where improvisation through movement was present. The duration of the performance was one hour where the voice of two performers overlapped, developing a constant rhythm within the space. 

Split, 2016 was performed in the MFA, Belfast School of Art Gallimaufry exhibition. 

The duration of the performance was one hour. 

you and me 2016 was a solo exhibition performed as part of the Democracy series at ArtBox, Dublin. 

The duration of the performance was 30 minutes. 

Breaking The Rule of Silence , 2015 was performed in D.I.T, Graduate Exhibition. 

This performance was site-specific and was performed in the Clock Tower, Grangegorman, Dublin. The duration of the performance was 30 minutes. 

Self-editing, a deliberate and conscious refusal to reveal and conceal visibility, can distort and rupture representation of the self and the access we have to “the image of the other”. In some moments, active disappearance can require recognition of who and what controls and surrounds us. A formative encounter with society’s acceptable narratives, self-editing and the visible self began with my research into the Magdalene Laundries.

The Magdalene Laundries were institutions run by Catholic orders, which operated from the 18th to the late 20th centuries in Ireland. Any women who appeared to challenge traditional notions of Irish morality were subjected to incarceration and hours of work in the laundry. Deemed as Irelands “fallen women” their lives and voice were rendered invisible. Due to the religious institutions "policy of secrecy” for "almost a full century" women incarcerated now "constitute the nation's disappeared". They did not matter or matter enough to a society that "sought to negate and render invisible their challenges" to the conceived notions of a moral order.

Peggy Phelan, in her book ‘Unmasked: The Politics of Performance’, exposes how “the secret of theatre’s power is dependent upon the truth of its illusion… theatre seeks to display the line between the visible and invisible power… whole truth is materially impossible; words fail. Yet it’s through this very impossibility that truth holds onto the real”. This work has a focus on acts of refusal, in particular, to give rise to the complexities and power structures contained within the speech act and the dominant institutions that rendered these voices “other”.

Live performance at a former Magdalene Laundry, Dublin, (2014). The performers scrubbed bars of soap for the duration of 6 hours a day for 5 days in response to the forced labour endured by women incarcerated.