You Can’t Hold a Banner by Yourself / creator, performer / in development - performance details TBA
You Can’t Hold a Banner by Yourself is an exhibition-performance about the role of carers, inspired by the aesthetics of protest. More specifically, it draws on the artist’s lived experience as a carer and her struggle with the shortcomings of the Irish mental health system.
You Can’t Hold a Banner by Yourself is part installation, part performance, part conversation. A commentary on the dysfunction of a system that has been reshaped and devalued under successive neo-liberal governments, the piece uses text-as-scenography to bring attention to the Mental Health Act, along with fragments from personal experience and found-text on the subject of care. In a white box space, she prepares posters, creates texts, paints and hangs sentences, words and paragraphs. By way of centering the carer’s experience, she gives voice to a fundamental element of the mental health ecosystem that is absent from the legal framework for mental health in Ireland. Through giving space for the audience to observe, support or interrupt the piece, she invites interrogation of the care / work dynamic.
In No Woman is an Island, Ró Stack addressed themes of productivity and political disillusionment under late Capitalism. She worked with projected text and became interested in text as material, design and co-performer, rather than content alone. With this piece, she builds on that inquiry by investigating the embodiment and materiality of text in a gallery space.