Sara Greavu is an artist and curator based in Derry. Her recent work has used Derry’s Halloween Carnival as a jumping-off point to explore the complex fears, desires, loyalties and longings of a ‘post-conflict’ society.

These works consider the Halloween carnival as a crack in the foundation of everyday society. Through this fissure erupt alternative histories, temporalities and narratives. The costumed chaos of the masquerade reveals as much as it conceals, providing a distorted lens through which to view the tensions at the heart of ‘post-conflict’ Ireland. The event is saturated with traces of the past and nostalgia for the future. Race, gender, class, sexuality, politics and performativity collide and collude; rub up against one another; get drunk and get off with each other.

Greavu’s methodology is that of the rag-picker: her works proposes a hybrid, bricolage aestheics of the discarded and the low. Fragmentary elements are gathered, reassembled, repurposed and recuperated.

Image Details

Halloween Lightboxes (2 of 3)

2010

Laser-cut Perspex, light box

Image size 841mm x 1189mm

Halloween Lightbox 1 (Circum-Atlantic)

Halloween Lightbox 2 (Hybrid)

 

Hybrid Halloween (Scene from Part 1)

2010

6:51 minutes

 

In View (Untitled)

2010

Photographs mounted to aluminium composite

30cm x 30cm 

Untitled 1 (Keffiyah)

Untitled 2 (Veil)

Untitled 3 (Camouflage)