Áine Phillips is a performance artist based in Galway, who has exhibited and performed in Ireland and internationally since the late 80s. Her work incorporates socially engaged practice and she often works with communities or place and or interest, including many collaborations with Irish and international artists. She creates live performance, installation and video works for multiple contexts: public space, social events, galleries, theatres, museums, biennales and film festivals. Her work is supported and collected by the Arts Council of Ireland and the National Museum of Ireland. Curating, writing and teaching are also part of her diverse practice. In 2015 Phillips authored and edited Performance Art in Ireland: A History (Live Art Development Agency and Intellect Books UK), the first survey to chart the development of live art and performance in Ireland since the 1970s. She is head of sculpture at Burren College of Art and Honorary Adjunct Faculty Research Supervisor at MTU.

My presentation explores how Irish performance art from the 1970s to the present day has engaged with the legacy of Ireland’s colonisation, north and south. Often synchronous with propositions and representations of decolonisation, performance art’s freedom from narrative and artistic tradition has allowed for compelling amalgamations of questions and answers to our political and social context.

A diverse selection of artists are examined who have made performance art works as provocations to our colonisation and who have made alternative futures or possibilities for decolonisation visible and manifest. Drawing on examples from my edited volume Performance Art in Ireland: A History (Intellect 2015) I examine a series of art works that directly address these themes using site specific actions, community engagement and practices foregrounding diverse identities and bodies. Focusing in particular on female, queer, disabled artists and artists of colour, I show how Irish performance art has made connections between colonisations of territory and of bodies.

Through a critical lens of hauntology, some of the works presented imagine surrogate or lost futures that posit new ways to understand colonial histories. Feminist theory is invoked to reveal the tangled colonisation of female, queer and disabled bodies to decode the historical, social and cultural influences feeding into Irish performance art over the past 50 years.

Examples from the work of Alastair MacLennon, Tara Babel and Sandra Johnson reflect perspectives on the colonisation of Northern Ireland in the 1970s and 80s. Performances by Pauline Cummins, Alanna O’Kelly and Mary Duffy examine the colonial project of patriarchal capitalism on gendered and disabled bodies through the 80s and 90s. In the 2000s, my own performance work addressed histories of women under the postcolonial imperatives of the Catholic Church in Ireland. Current work by Day Magee, Léanne Herlihy and transfemme artist of colour Venus Patel provide striking examples of ‘othered’ and queer Irish decolonisation.