Museum Visits 2016- The MAC

To help us with our assignments we decided to go visit some museums as a class to gain inspiration.

The first museum we went to was The MAC Museum which first opened here in Belfast on 20th April 2012, MAC stands for metropolitan arts center.

WHAT WE SAW-

The first thing we looked at was the first solo exhibition in the UK and Ireland by LA artist Mariah Garnett, titled ‘Mariah Garnett: Other & Father’.

She mixes both experimental and documentary style film making in producing her work, this film focuses on the relationship Mariah had with her Belfast born father and the idea of representation and construction of memory/family love contrasted to the way cities affected by conflict shape their own identity.

How this project was presented was through a double video projection. We walked into a dark room and on one wall there was a channel showing BBC archived footage of Mariah’s father filmed in 1971 and on the other wall was a channel showing another re-staged material shot in 2015.

This work reinterprets personal and political history carved as part of this city over forty years ago showing the infallibility of private/personal memory as well as Mariah’s own experiences of a place which to her is both strange and familiar.

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A lot of the other works we saw was form the Dublin based artist Niamh McCann and her work ‘La perruque’.

One of the main pieces which is described as ‘Sculptural Poetry’ took up much the room.

It was various coloured and textured pieces said to be ‘overlaid with different narratives, stories and meanings.

Although the MAC was very unique in its pieces I feel as if it only took half an hour to get around the whole thing, would have enjoyed more pieces on displayed. Otherwise than that it was a grand enough experience.