Aideen Barry is an Irish visual artist.

This Long Minute is part of a tryptic of 1 minute works extracted out of a larger piece titled ‘Possession’. It is performative film work in which we see a protagonist manifest bizarre and odd behaviour from the confinement of domestic life. Barry is simultaneously performer and director and has created a cacophony of slapstick humour and antidepressant comedy as her protagonist manifests the extraordinary out of the mundanity of domestic confined life. There is a Beckett-ian nod to the work of Barry, a "I can't go on, I'll go on" that drives this 6min30sec original moving image work which was made in 2011 but by 2020, within the context of the current pandemic, takes on renewed meaning and significance.

In Barry’s words: “The work ‘Possession’ was conceived in 2011 following the massive economic collapse that engulfed Ireland. Suddenly that word, Possession, seems to be such a heavy, loaded word. People were suddenly "possessed" by abject horror at the state of our economic and social reality, houses were becoming re-possessed by vulture funds and people were finding themselves living in half-finished mass housing estates all over the country suddenly in negative equity. The words "ghost-estates" were banded about as a way to describe how the mass housing boom had really not been considered with over a quarter a million houses in various states of build now facing the reality that they would never be lived in. To me, these seemed like the most haunted of all houses, never truly to have ghosts in them. It was hard not to conjure up quotes of Poe's "The Fall of the house of Usher". Of course I too was possessed when making this film, as I tried to be both in front of and behind the camera simultaneously and the shots required me to push myself into an extraordinarily uncomfortable position to get the perfect split second shot of abject humour just right.

A further backdrop to all this carnage was the place that the role of women were enshrined too. Within our constitution Article 41.2.3 ascribes "A woman's place is in the Home". This proclamation has led to the subjugation of women in numerous forms of gendered objectiveness. I embrace the Beckett-ian black humour that I use as a kind of crowbar to activate conversations that are often too dark to tackle straight on: inequality, gender issues, class constructs.”

Concept & Creation | Aideen Barry
Curator of The Long Minute | Bronwyn Lace