Michael Boran, Sabina Mac Mahon, Alan Phelan, Sarah Pierce False Memory Syndrome

In 2013, Temple Bar Gallery + Studios celebrates its 30^th Anniversary. The organisation was founded in 1983 by Jenny Haughton, who invited a group of artists to claim space within a semi-derelict factory building in Temple Bar. Through the vision and determination of a number of individuals, over the intervening years the building was transformed into a purpose built complex of artists work spaces and a gallery. Temple Bar Gallery + Studios has been a site where countless new projects, practices, friendships and careers have been created over the last 30 years , and at the same time much has been lost. Memories remain in the minds of the artists who worked and continue to work at Temple Bar Gallery + Studios. Paper files have been discarded, or archived at the National Irish Visual Arts Library. Computer files have been left on old hard drives, never to be recovered.

As part of the 30^th anniversary celebrations, TBG+S is producing a book entitled Generation – 30 years of Creativity at Temple Bar Gallery + Studios. In the process of researching this publication, many forgotten stories, images, objects and archival materials have been gathered together to tell a story of the organisation. This story is selective, and based on the material that could be found. There are many other stories that are not represented. While not telling a definitive story, by its publication, the book creates an official history for TBG+S.

In the exhibition False Memory Syndrome, Four artists present alternative histories for Temple Bar Gallery + Studios. These artists were invited, because of their history with TBG+S, to exhibit art works that respond to the gathered research, and to their experiences of the building and its inhabitants.

Sabina Mac Mahon’s work takes the archaeological excavation of 9 Temple Bar in 1993, in preparation for the redevelopment of the building, as a starting point. The work undertakes a mini-exploration of the nature of collections and archives, and the variety of material that can be found in them - both the strange and the ordinary. Mac Mahon worked as the main researcher on the 30th Anniversary publication and has an intimate knowledge of the archival history of TBG+S. Her work for the exhibition describes the often frustrating nature of the TBGS Archive as well as looking at the relationship between TBG+S and Temple Bar.

Alan Phelan’s starting point for his work 50 came from the well-known Multiples project , a series of six curated cabinet exhibitions that took place in TBG+S between 1998 and 2001 (with tours to other venues until 2004). Reasoning at the time sought to balance the presentation of accessibly priced objects that would make contemporary work affordable to a wide range of audience, whilst at the same time raising much needed funds for TBG+S.

The various editions of the cabinets were curated by eight curators and showcased work by a range of over 150 artists. These were both well known and relatively obscure; some of whom would become household names, and others who changed from art making into other careers. Alan Phelan recreates a synthesis of this cabinet of contemporary curiosities, revising 50 of the Multiples (with some originals included). It is normal for Phelan to take a wry jab at the original context and content of works, and with this piece the archive is negotiated through the Phelan’s own practice, functioning as part tribute and part critique.

Michael Boran’s work ‘Far and Away’ is different in that it comes from the artists own archive. Michael Boran is an artist who has been a studio member at TBG+S since 1991. Two years before TBG+S opened its renovated building, the area was used as a stand in for Boston in the 1890s for the film ‘Far and Away’. Boran’s photographs are a curious mixture of document and fiction. In choosing this brief interlude from the history of the area Boran captures some of the architectural facts and sense of the area from which TBG+S emerged, yet it is overlaid with false clues to somewhere else, a more remote past which strangely prefigures touristic expectations and Mary Harney’s famous signalling of “Boston not Berlin” as a development model. As he points out, ‘false history was quickly to become the norm in Temple Bar, as pubs opened with signs proclaiming “established in 1870” , the installation of cobblestones and the general repackaging of the area as a themed destination’. In Boran’s photographs, past and present merge in a strange palimpsest. We get a glimpse of competing pasts and a nostalgia for a more recent time when the possibility of a new cultural quarter in the city was still a blank canvas.

On the opening night of the exhibition, Wednesday 4 September, Sarah Pierce will present a performance entitled Artist or Superartist? based on material drawn from the TBG+S archive.

A round table discussion chaired by Sarah Pierce between the artists in the exhibition and the curator, Rayne Booth, will take place on Tuesday 24 September at 5pm. The discussion will hinge on the subject of institutional memory, fictional institutions, and the archive.