ACTIVE FORGETTING EXHIBITION

 TYPA Museum Tartu Estonia 8/12/2021-14/01/2022

Oona Hyland’s work Active Forgetting highlights an Irish institutional massacre which took place in over mother and baby homes and Magdalene laundries, between 1922 and 1998. The work she is making is an exploration of insidious trauma both from a personal and political viewpoint. She concerned with the power of trauma, which can be intergenerationally transferred. It does not fade and can haunt the children of survivors. The unspoken grief of minority subjects is another concern.

Erasure is an important theme and integral to her material process. This is a series of experimental works, primarily print, but also using film and alternative photography techniques such as Cyanotype. The film Touching Time is a collaboration with Anna Viola Hallberg who like Hyland explores ideas of ‘otherness’, marginalisation and the scapegoat, and the legacy of betrayal involving both people and institutions of the state (as Hannah Arendt would say the ‘banality of evil’). Hyland is interested in exploring these ideas not to illustrate them but to embody them through the process of making the work.