Marianne Keating
Born:
Ireland
Lives in:
London, United Kingdom
Location
- White Bay Power Station
Marianne Keating is an Irish artist and researcher based in London. Her practice-based research explores Irish history, particularly the complex legacies of colonialism, migration and empire and the often-overlooked experiences of the Irish diaspora, especially in Jamaica. Through visual, material and oral traces, and supported by intensive on-site investigation, she reconstructs and reimagines these fragmented histories. By accumulating these disregarded and overlooked traces, she seeks to reinsert previously muted or silenced voices into the archive, giving them renewed presence through her practice-based work as an artist-researcher. Her multidisciplinary approach integrates multi-screen film installations within a broader framework of archival research and material exploration, utilising large-scale prints, textiles, photography, text, sculpture and sound-based installations. Through the interplay of these elements, Keating constructs multilayered and immersive environments to critically engage with questions of history, memory and representation, situating her work within ongoing discourses on post/neo-colonial identity and diaspora.
Presentation at the 25th Biennale of Sydney was made possible with generous support from Culture Ireland, and generous assistance from British Council in Sydney, The Showroom, London, UK and The Arts Council of Ireland.
Marianne Keating, An Ciúnas / The Silence, 2023. Presentation at the 25th Biennale of Sydney was made possible with generous support from Culture Ireland, and generous assistance from British Council in Sydney, The Showroom, London, UK and The Arts Council of Ireland. Courtesy of the artist © Marianne Keating. Installation view, 25th Biennale of Sydney, Rememory, 2026, White Bay Power Station. Photograph: Marianne Keating
Marianne Keating
Born in Tipperary, Ireland
Lives and works in London, United Kingdom
An Ciúnas / The Silence 2023
video installation, looped 59:40 mins
Presentation at the 25th Biennale of Sydney was made possible with generous support from Culture Ireland, and generous assistance from British Council in Sydney, The Showroom, London, UK and The Arts Council of Ireland
Courtesy the artist
A complex account of Ireland’s and Jamaica’s struggles for self-determination, An Ciúnas / The Silence parallels migration from Ireland to both Jamaica and Britain during the period preceding the Great Famine (1845–52) through to the present day. Beginning with the history of Irish indentured labourers, recruited to work in post-abolition Jamaica, artist Marianne Keating articulates the significance of this Irish diaspora in the evolution of Jamaican politics. An Ciúnas / The Silence also investigates Irish migration to Britian following successive eras of economic crisis from the 1900s to the 2010s.
Titled for The Great Silence, a multi-faceted legacy of cultural suppression within Ireland stemming from The Great Famine, An Ciúnas / The Silence positions the British colonial influences which forced Irish people into indenture as inextricable from those which pushed them toward migration. Upending and complicating official histories, Keating asks which stories are told and who has the platform to speak them.