John Hansard Gallery is pleased to present Scene of the Myth, by Sarah Pierce.
Guest curated by Rike Frank and the European Kunsthalle, the expansive solo exhibition consists of performances, videos, installations, and archives. Sarah Pierce, who lives and works in Dublin, relocated to Ireland from the US in 2000. Rike Frank has brought together six works, spanning twenty years, to highlight patterns of making and thinking that define Pierce’s art practice. Borne out of sticky relationships between the narratives we reproduce and those we wish to leave behind, Scene of the Myth asks what it means to gather, reflect, and act in community.
The exhibition title stems from one of Pierce’s essays in which the artist describes social infrastructures, such as academies and museums, as moments through which the narratives and conventions of a historical past are re-constituted in the present. The ‘scene of the myth’ is not an actual location; it is an occasion where knowledges, both inherited and invented, come into play. An exhibition is one such occasion with the potential to mark out specific “scenes” in and around Pierce’s practice: Institutes and Protests, Legacies and Exercises, Communities and Migrations. This iteration of the exhibition offers opportunities for re-telling and re-shaping; not only of Pierce’s work itself, but through the personal reflections and resonances it provokes in ourselves.
Scene of the Myth features a significant selection of projects with students and local community, who appear as performers, demonstrators, and interlocutors, including Campus (2011), a performance that mirrors communal acts such as teaching, learning, and political protest; and The Square (2017), an experimental “play without a script” that uses Bertolt Brecht’s Lehrstück – or learning play – as a starting point. Pierce will involve student groups and local community in the re-learning and re-staging of key performance works at intervals throughout the exhibition.
Over recent years, Pierce has developed a concept she names the “community of the exhibition” to describe how exhibitions have a particular ability to hold us, and works of art, in community. We enter the exhibition with others – other audiences, across generations, geographies and times. The show will include artworks that bring to the fore this ongoing and discerning interest in community’s tenuous and unavowable bonds, whether it is the community of dementia in No Title (2017), the community of diaspora in Pathos of Distance (2015), or the community of readers in Shelter Bread & Freedom (2021).
This is the third iteration of this exhibition. It spans a broad period of Pierce’s practice but is not intended as a retrospective. It is an exhibition structured around specific ideas, themes, and the interrelationships between works. Scene of the Myth started its journey as a larger selection of works at Irish Museum of Modern Art/IMMA, Dublin. It was then reconfigured in a condensed form at GfZK in Leipzig and has now culminated at John Hansard Gallery as a concise collation of six works.
A zine has been produced to accompany the exhibition. Read it here.
The exhibition has been organised by Irish Museum of Modern Art/IMMA, Dublin, in collaboration with John Hansard Gallery, University of Southampton and GfZK – Galerie für Zeitgenössische Kunst Leipzig.
