Red Bird’s Bittersweet at Galway Arts Centre

Bittersweet is a collaborative installation by Red Bird Youth Collective and artists from the Child and Adolescent Mental Health Service Day Hospital, at Merlin Park Hospital. On display in Galway Arts Centre, in Galway City, it has been facilitated by artist Louise Manifold.

The exhibition’s centrepiece is a dystopian film piece, exploring legacy and inherited trauma. Participants in the collaboration devised and created an experimental film, utilising performance and movement to create meaning. The starting point for the film is the story of James Connolly handing his son a .22 gun and asking him to fight for his country.

That’s something Red Bird members learned about last year in school during the 1916 commemoration.

This inheritance of politics and ideologies started a discussion on legacy in relation to the current political climate.

For more, read this week’s Galway City Tribune.