Listowel International Storytelling Festival kicks off a busy Autumn and Winter schedule for curaor.ie.
On Thursday 14 September Ciarán Walsh ‘curates’ The Bolex Boys: An Adventure in Storytelling in Film, a public conversation with filmmakers John Lynch & Michael Mulcahy. They created an extraordinary cinematic record of the changing social and cultural landscape of North Kerry from the 1970s onwards.
The Storytelling event marks the beginning of a collaboration with Kerry Writers’ Museum with funding from the Regional 2023 Museum Exhibitions Scheme. The project involves the digitisation of Lynch and Mulcahy’s 1978 film The Way I Remember It, featuring a soundtrack created by Eamon Keane. The film will be the centre piece of The Bolex Boys exhibition which opens in Kerry Writers’ Museum on 19 October.
In the meantime, Berghahn Books (New York and Oxford) will publish Ciarán Walsh’s radical telling of the story of Haddon ‘the Head-hunter‘ in Ireland. The book will be launched in the Royal Anthropological Institute in London on 31 October and Walsh will curate an exhibition of photography for the occasion.
Pages from Dixon photo album © National Library of Ireland
Haddon and the Aran Islands will be constructed around an ethnographic account of the Islands Haddon presented as a slideshow in 1890. Haddon used photographs Andrew Francis Dixon took under his direction. Walsh discovered Dixons negatives in 2014 and commissioned a new set of digitised images in 2019.
This exhibition is the first time this remarkable photographic experiment will have been shown in public. The exhibition will also include a critical review of Haddon’s influences and impact and will include the a scan of oldest surviving photograph of Skellig Michael (1868) and a photographJohn Millington Synge took in the Aran Islands in 1898.
A digital scan from the negative made in 2009 for Walsh’s groundbreaking exhibition John Millington Synge, PhotographerCourtesy of the Board of Trinity College, University of Dublin (2023).
