Hélène Lecossois is Professor of Irish Literary Studies at the University of Lille (France). The primary focus of her research is the relation od theatre to history. Her other research interests include modernism, twentieth-century Irish drama, postcolonial and performance studies. Her latest publications include Performance, Modernity and the Plays of J. M. Synge (Cambridge University Press, 2020).

This paper will explore the ends of empire as refracted through the practices of three contemporary Irish female artists, all working with performance in multi-media contexts: Miriam de Búrca (1972-), Jesse Jones (1978-) and Olwen Fouéré (1954-). It borrows its title from the 2024 solo exhibition of Miriam de Búrca’s work at the Galway Arts Centre exhibition (curator: Megs Morley) which returned again and again to the continuing damage done by colonialism in Ireland and Palestine.

The paper will focus in particular on the ways in which the artistic and performance practices of de Búrca, Jones and Fouéré challenge the condition of the modern, bourgeois spectator, re-conceptualize spectatorship and explore the possibilities of a decolonial gaze. Nicholas Ridout highlights the crucial role that institutional theatre, and “the theatre as it appears in other media”, has played in consolidating the fiction of the powerlessness of the modern subject-spectator vis-à-vis colonial violence or environmental destruction (Scenes from Bourgeois Life, 2020).

Miriam de Búrca’s visual and installation art (Anatomy of chaos I; what remains? (2018); Suspended scream (2024), Found/Acquired (2024), “We lay waste, we burn, we plunder, we destroy the houses and the trees” (2024)) takes a long historical lens to look at the role art has played in legitimizing colonial projects and raises the question of reparation. In works such as Tremble, Tremble (2017) and The Tower (2022), Jesse Jones plays with perspective and is interested in what happens when you dispense with imperial epistemologies. Her work invites thinking about what can lead to a positive reimagining of the world. As for Olwen Fouéré, her entire career as a performer (from her work with Operating Theatre in the 1980s to her recent collaborations with Jesse Jones (Tremble, Tremble; The Tower) has been dedicated to deconstructing representation and finding a performance vocabulary to reinvent the world.