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ARTSDESK MERE ANARCHY A séance with William Butle
r Yeats at the Hellfire Club informs the latest work by Kendell Geers. words Jack O’Higgins The day I meet Kendell Geers also happens to be the birthday of William Butler Yeats. That’s a fitting coincidence when you consider the inception for Geers’ new exhibition came from a séance he had with the man himself. Of course, if you asked Geers, he’d laugh and tell you there’s no such thing as coincidence. Created in collaboration with a/political and Rua Red, The Second Coming features a huge iron pyramid, green and blue wallpaper containing dense hieroglyphics and a white neon sign proclaiming “Fucking Hell”. When you walk into the room for the first time, you can’t help but think something similar. The exhibition marks the fifth collaboration between a/political and Rua Red in their twoyear partnership. When South African artist Kendell Geers became available to work on a new exhibition, it was important that he came to Tallaght to consider the local context. “It’s always been important to us and a/ political that the artist spends time here and makes work that relates very much to this place,” says Rua Red’s Executive Director, Maolíosa Boyle. “It’s about spending time with the people, understanding the place and creating a response to that. One of the things we thought Kendell would be interested in was the Hellfire Club.” Geers has harboured an interest in Magick and the mystic artists since his teenager years, so he leapt at the opportunity to visit the Hellfire Club, a place known for all kinds of debauchery and occult practices in the 18th Century. On the night that he and members of a/political and Rua Red visited Montpellier Hill, he claims to have communicated with Yeats. “We all have the ability to experience more than three dimensions and five senses,” Geers says. “You basically need to slow down your expectations, your consciousness, to the point where you tune in to another way of seeing and hearing. “At some point if you tune in, it’s like a bolt of lightning, it just descends on you,” he continues. “I don’t know how long it was for, but time disappears and it only feels like a second. I came out of the lodge completely disorientated and everyone saw me looking a little disheveled. I just said ‘I can’t talk about it! I need time to digest what just happened!’” Eventually Geers realised what his experience meant; he needed to set up a new temple, a “second coming” of the Hellfire Club in Tallaght. The exhibition has many layers, but at its core, it is designed to be a symbol of hope that interrogates the basic assumptions we make in our day to day lives. “It’s interesting, when I take the tram from the centre of Dublin to here, the tram stops basically go ‘shopping centre, hospital, shopping centre, hospital.’ That’s a very interesting portrait of a city.” “The shopping mall has been installed in all these places as centres to give you hope,” he continues. “But this is a false hope, an unsustainable one based on raping the resources around the planet. It’s filled with things that don’t come from this area, but in Chinese sweatshops so we will all look the same.” Third World Disorder – the pyramid at the centre of the exhibition – is a hierarchal structure, based on the brutalist architecture of the shopping centre across the road from Rua Red. But if you walk around it, there’s an entrance that allows you to travel through the interior until you reach the core, a room covered with mirrors. In the centre of the room stands a single candle, reflected into infinity on either side If the pyramid represents the structures that make life so simultaneously draining, hopeless and apocalyptic, then the candle represents a hope that breeds untold possibilities in the infinity mirror. Standing in the centre of the pyramid as both the candle’s light and your own image reproduce themselves into infinity is a surprisingly moving and meditative experience. 70