Untitled by Celina Muldoon

In Untitled performers adorned in lavishly constructed costumes interact with and incite audience participation, interrogating and challenging our notions around stereotypical ideas of representation and identity, while go-pro cameras strapped to their helmets live stream this footage to monitors positioned among the audience.
Referring to Foucault’s Panopticon theory, Judith Butler’s ‘Gender Performativity’ and analysing the body as representation of political agency, the work is realised through a sci-fi re-enactment of mythological narratives, transfiguring into a role swapping spectacle. Foucault proposes that not only prisons, but all hierarchical structures like the army, schools, hospitals and factories have evolved through history to resemble Bentham’s Panopticon. Borrowing from this concept this live interactive event plays with the subject of surveillance and Butler’s ideas around phenomenology and the lived experience.

Duration: 30 mins
Muldoon is an Artist based in North West Ireland. She has recently been awarded The Next Generation Bursary Award and The Artist in the Community Scheme Award from the Arts Council of Ireland. Current research includes exploring ancient mythology in North West Ireland in relation to youth sub-cultures today. A second project involves delivering Live Art workshops to groups in ‘hard to reach’ areas in the North West.
Graduating with a First Class Honours in Fine Art from I.T. Sligo (2014) Muldoon completed a Masters in Fine Art, Sculpture and Expanded practices from the National College of Art and Design (2016). Her graduate multidisciplinary piece We are in cahoots…You and I was featured on James Merrigan’s SHITLIST 2016. It was selected by El Putnam of Mobius (Boston) to be screened for Interference: Performance Art in Ireland at Boston Cyberarts Gallery in September 2017. Her work has been purchased by the Institute of Technology, Sligo for their permanent collection. She was a member of Jesse Jones’ Feminist Collective in NO MORE FUN AND GAMES, Dublin City Gallery and has performed with Amanda Coogan in I’LL Sing You A Song From Around The Town in The Royal Hibernian Academy.
Live performance venues include the Firkin Crane theatre, Cork, Livestock; Performance Art platform, Dublin; The Complex Gallery, Dublin and MART Gallery Dublin. Muldoon has recently exhibited in Glasgow with WAVEparticle and Celine Gallery. Between June and December 2016 she completed the ‘cultural dialogues’ residency in MART studios and Gallery, Dublin. She has performed with Dublin Live Art Festival 2017. As part of the Next Generation Award she has recently concluded a residency in the Tyrone Guthrie centre.
Writer and Philosopher Dr. El Putnam writes of Muldoon’s 2016 work Navel Gazing with Nora Helmer:
Muldoon cultivates a false façade of hospitality glazed in the consumable culture within which we exist. She changes her headdresses throughout the performance, taking on the form of a dominatrix that complicates the scenario presented. At certain moments she pauses, gazing nowhere as tears seem to collect in her eyes, alluding to a crack in her emotional mask. These psychic shimmers slip away to the beat of the music providing the soundtrack, alluding to a hidden depth of human relations that exceeds the public eye. Her performance is an exaggerated spectacle that simultaneously reveals its falseness and hides an unknown truth, acknowledging the complexity of life within the home.

Muldoon cultivates a false façade of hospitality glazed in the consumable culture within which we exist. She changes her headdresses throughout the performance, taking on the form of a dominatrix that complicates the scenario presented. At certain moments she pauses, gazing nowhere as tears seem to collect in her eyes, alluding to a crack in her emotional mask. These psychic shimmers slip away to the beat of the music providing the soundtrack, alluding to a hidden depth of human relations that exceeds the public eye. Her performance is an exaggerated spectacle that simultaneously reveals its falseness and hides an unknown truth, acknowledging the complexity of life within the home. [break]
Writer and Philosopher Dr. El Putnam on Muldoon’s 2016 work Navel Gazing with Nora Helmer