VIDEO DESCRIPTION:

Play, download and edit the free video APhillips_TheRobing RoomSCREENER_6Mbps25Stereo_20211022a.

In the Robing Room
Áine Phillips 2012

Camera Vivienne Dick
Editor Connie Farrell

Recorded in the 18th Century Roman Catholic Bishop’s Robing Room, Kilkenny.
Áine Phillips performs a futile robing ceremony in an unfit dress. In memory of girls and women incarcerated in Magdalen Laundries, and their lost children.

Testimonies of women who lived and worked in the Good Shepard Magdalen Laundry, Limerick were collected by Evelyn Glynn and voiced by Áine Phillips

Synopsis
In the Robing Room is a short performance film by Áine Phillips made with Vivienne Dick as cinematographer in 2012. The piece was filmed in the Bishop's Robing Room in Kilkenny as part of Kilkenny Arts Festival curated by Josephine Kelliher that year. The filmed performance is a metaphoric struggle with a distorted, mutated dress that will not fit and is impossible to wear. It was created within an installation of video projections onto long flowing panels of muslin in the darkened 18th century Bishops Robing Roomoom. This installation was presented widely in Ireland and internationally at exhibitions, screenings and festivals between 2011 and 2018.

Concept & Technique
Conceptually, this piece explores the problematics of the Residential Institutions Redress Board which was charged with compensating those who had suffered physical, sexual and emotional abuse in childcare institutions subject to State regulation in Ireland. Those who received ‘redress’ compensation must adhere to a confidentiality clause that bans them from speaking publicly about their experience. This injustice emerged in Ireland 2010 and mirrored the shameful attitudes to injustice in the past whereby a society of secrecy functions to suppress truth and reparation. To create and film this live performance in a Bishop's Robing Room was a perfect synchronism of poetic justice.

Screenings
2010 - Right Here Right Now Kilmainham Gaol, Dublin
2011 - Live@8 Occupy Space, Limerick
2012 - Kilkenny Arts Festival
2014 - Eigse, Carlow Arts Festival
2015 - Femlink Screenings: Spain, Bilbao, Espacio Puerta, Croatia
2016 - Femlink Screenings: Lithuania Cinema Center Romuva and Gallery POST. Tengri Umai Art-Gallery, Almaty, Kazakhstan
2018 - Femlink Screenings: Gallery Sitka Fitchburg USA, Galatea Gallery Boston USA and Galway Arts Centre

2022 - A Nation Under the Influence: Ireland at 100, Centre Culturel Irlandais, Paris
2022 is the centenary of both Irish independence and the publication in Paris of James Joyce’s Ulysses. The Centre Culturel Irlandais in Paris is curating a new exhibition of work by six artists that explores key influences that were already at play in 1922 when Ireland became a Free State, together with the legacy of those that were put in train by its new government. This is an honest spotlight on the maturing of a nation, in the vein of the candid portrait of Dublin painted by Ulysses, and looks most particularly at the influence of colonisation, religious zealotry and nationalism on Irish society and politics.

Download, play and edit free videos and free audios from APhillips_TheRobing RoomSCREENER_6Mbps25Stereo_20211022a using RedcoolMedia.net web apps