At 1pm on Sunday December 5th artist Anthony Haughey and more than 50 participants gathered at Fort Dunree to produce an artist intervention. Anthem is the outcome of Anthony’s 2021 Artlink residency co-created with residents living near Fort Dunree, Buncrana and Drumfries. This event marks the centenary of the signing of the Anglo-Irish Treaty on the 6th of December 1921. At that time Ireland was largely defined in terms of Nationalist/Unionist cultural identities. One hundred years later Ireland is a more culturally diverse society. This artwork questions what national identity means in twenty-first-century Ireland.
Anthony was artist-in-residence between June and December, spreading his residency out to maximise networking opportunities and to give time to distil ideas and allow them to become embedded in the location. He connected with a number of local groups including the Desertegney and Buncrana Foroige groups, Geraldine Timlin (Avant Garden) and Ned’s Point Swimming Group. He also engaged with John Hegarty and John McCarron (West Inishowen history & Heritage Society) and other people with a sound knowledge of local history. Anthony hosted a number of workshops with these groups, asking participants to design flags to represent both Fort Dunree and Neds Point Fort as well as proposing a future flag for Ireland.
Fort Dunree was a strategic military site for the British during World War One and played a significant role during the Anglo-Irish treaty negotiations. Part of the settlement included an agreement for the British to retain sovereignty of Fort Dunree as well as two other ‘Treaty Ports’. The ceremony to hand back the fort to the Irish government in 1938 was officiated by lowering the Union flag and raising the Irish tricolour, by a coincidence the flag bearers from the opposing British and Irish military were also brothers-in-law.
This art intervention invited some of the participants who designed flags to raise them on flagpoles above Fort Dunree, in a non-militaristic act of citizenship. All of the participant’s flag designs were available to view in the Saldanha Gallery.
In talking about the work Anthony Haughey comments “I am interested in re-shaping acts of commemoration and inviting participants and audiences to connect with complex historical events in not just an intellectual but also an emotional level. Anthem is part of a larger project I’m working on during my National Museum of Ireland Decade of Centenaries artist residency; in fact the work carried out at Artlink has been important in the development of this larger project”.
Anthony Haughey is an artist, educator and co-founder of the Centre for Socially Engaged Practice Based Research at TU Dublin. Recent exhibitions include the film trilogy Assemble, made in collaboration with the Global Migration Collective; Citizen Nowhere / Citizen Somewhere: The Imagined Nation, Crawford Gallery, Cork; Go Down Moses, Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago; Field Notes From the Border, and 21st Century Ireland in 21 Artworks, Glebe Gallery, Donegal. He recently collaborated with Seamus Deane to produce a billboard work in Derry railway station and was appointed National Museum of Ireland, Decade of Centenaries artist-in residence 2021-2023.
- December 05, 2021
