Our latest guests on @art.wank won it!! In 2021, an arts collective, Array Collective won this prestigious prize for their installation, ‘The Druthaib’s Ball’.
.‘The Druthaib’s Ball, new work for Turner Prize 2021, has been realised twice over. In Belfast it was a wake for the centenary of Ireland’s partition in the Black Box (grassroots venue), and was attended by semi-mythological druids along with a community of artists and activists wearing hand-made costumes.
At the Herbert, the event has been transformed into an immersive installation. An imagined síbín (a ‘pub without permission’) hosts a film created from the Belfast event, and a TV showing Northern Ireland Screen’s Digital Film Archive. A large canopy styled from banners provides a floating roof. The síbín is approached through a circle of flag poles, that references ancient Irish ceremonial sites and contemporary structures, and is illuminated by a dawn-to-dusk light.
Array invite us into a place of contradictions where trauma, dark humour, frustration, and release coexist. It is a place to gather outside the sectarian divides that have dominated the collective memory of the North of Ireland for the last hundred years.’
.We had a wonderful time chatting over zoom to two of Arrays members Sighle Bhreathnach-Cashell and Stephen Millar. Thanks for your time!