Twinsome Minds: Recovering 1916 in Images and Stories
Through an interplay of storytelling, animations, music and poetry, Richard Kearney and Sheila Gallagher’s Twinsome Minds mines what is often lost behind official historical accounts and acts of commemoration, and proposes a transformative work of interpreting Dublin’s Easter Rising for a new generation.
Twinsome Minds (a phrase from Finnegans Wake) re-imagines a series of micro-narratives surrounding 1916 in Dublin and the WWI battlefields of Belgium. The stories and images of eclipsed history concentrate on ‘twinned’ pairs – family members, neighbors, school friends, lovers – who ended up on opposite sides during this time of great upheaval in British-Irish relations. The various scenes explore crossings of memory and imagination, anecdote and legend, history and myth – as well as loyalty and love. They are framed and retold by writer and philosopher, Richard Kearney with screen projections by the artist, Sheila Gallagher, and an original music score by Dana Lyn.
Kearney and Gallagher’s multimedia presentation shows how the 1916 centenary is a cause for commemoration but also for reflection — Boston Globe
Tour
SPRING ’16
Abbey Theatre, Dublin, Jan 23
Swedish Museum of History, Stockholm, March 6
Gulbenkian Arts Centre, Lisbon, March 8
Centre Culturel Irlandais, Paris, March 11
Irish Arts Center, New York, March 22
Quinnipiac Performing Arts Center, New Haven, April 4
Tsai Performance Center, Boston, April 29
SUMMER ’16
The Nerve Centre, Derry, Northern Ireland, June 9
The Belfast Book Festival, Belfast, Northern Ireland, June 10
Muintir Na Tire Hall, Limerick, Ireland, June 13
FALL ’16
Loyola Marymount University, Los Angeles, California, USA, Sept. 23
Lincoln Theatre, Damariscotta, Maine, Oct. 7
St. Johns, Newfoundland, Canada, Nov. 4
Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey, USA, Dec. 9
FALL ’17
Smithsonian Museum of American History, Washington D.C., Oct. 15, 2017
Twinsome Minds at the Irish Arts Center in NY, NY on March 22, 2016. Photos courtesy of the Amanda Gentile, IAC
Directed by
Richard Kearney
WRITER, PERFORMER & CO-DIRECTOR
Richard Kearney is a writer, professor and cultural organizer of several international projects. He has written two novels, a volume of poetry, several books on the role of imagination and narrative in Irish culture, literature and the arts. He has served as a member of the Irish Arts Council, Chair of the UCD Film School and public intellectual and broadcaster. He is founder director of the International Guestbook Project, ‘Exchanging Stories, Changing Histories’.
Sheila Gallagher
PERFORMER & CO-DIRECTOR
Sheila Gallagher is an interdisciplinary artist, curator, and professor of art at Boston College. She has had numerous solo exhibitions, and has exhibited widely at commercial galleries, museums, and universities internationally. Gallagher is the co-curator of the Becker Collection, a private archive of Civil War drawings currently touring the United States. Together with Richard Kearney she co-directs the Guestbook Project.
In terms of both content and presentation it is a vital contribution to the wider understanding of 1916, and its meaning for us here in 2016
— John Peto, Culture Northern Ireland
Companion Book
Twinsome Minds has been adapted for publication
How do we give a future to the past? How do we perform acts of double remembrance that honor both sides of the story — spoken and unspoken, acknowledged and forgotten? One hundred years after the Easter Rising, Twinsome Minds: an Act of Double Remembrance explores the complexities of commemoration against the backdrops of the Famine and 1916. Using word and image, artist Sheila Gallagher and philosopher Richard Kearney retrieve some neglected micronarratives of Irish historical trauma to illustrate how memory occurs at the cross section of story and history. In an inventive combination of archival imagery, historical records, and narrative imagination, they mine the past for potential futures in a process of healing and recovery.
Twinsome Minds: an Act of Double Remembrance was released in 2018 as part of the award-winning Famine Folio Series from Ireland’s Great Hunger Museum, Quinnipiac University and available from Cork University Press.
Between myth and history, anecdote and legend, each scene brilliantly dramatizes and narrates stories of friends, lovers and family members who found themselves caught up on opposite sides in 1916.
— Télérama, Sortir Paris
Press
Twinsome Minds was made possible by:
