libraries of rest

libraries of rest represents an evolution in Irish artist Ciara Barker’s work to date, expanding her previous installation practice to create a fully immersive collective resource. Her artistic approach combines installation, gameplay, sound and light, to inhabit a space between visual art, large-scale environments and critical theory. This interdisciplinary approach is grounded in a material exploration of the body, by creating ephemeral and flexible work that considers people in space. Through accommodations for comfort, this installation work encourages audiences to consider alternative futures centred on collective care, divorced from productivity. 

As a concept, the library provides a model for the distribution of collective resources. Libraries, in this context, facilitate an imagined future that opens a dialogue surrounding the role resting can play in people’s lives, encouraging audiences to contemplate, with body and mind, what it would be like to access a public service that provides ways to rest. Using materials associated with normative resting, playing and brainstorming practices, Barker invites audiences to collaborate on undoing learned behaviour around resting. Common elements of Barker’s visual language feature, with divisions created by mylar highlighted by blue and red lighting. The mylar introduces a permeable and malleable dimension to the idea of boundary, while the depth and line of the lighting play with the demarcation of space.

Barker’s practice engages with the constraints of contemporary artistic process, considering the demands placed on artists and arts practitioners to create in specific ways with uniform outcomes. This creation of a collective resource through unstructured participatory methods stands in opposition to the white gallery wall. Barker’s exploration of rest as a method of resistance is informed by a number of critical works, including texts by Tricia Hersey, Dr Saundra Dalton-Smith, Sonya Renee Taylor and Dr Devon Price. This scholarship is grounded in an examination of structural inequality and rest as a racial, disability rights and social justice issue that disproportionately affects marginalised communities. 

mankyy’s soundscape captures restful practices from a variety of perspectives, from dreaming and contemplation to story-telling and creativity. Through a conversation with John Logan, originally from Ballinamore, Leitrim, mankyy also interrogates restlessness and finality. Facilitating a multisensory engagement with the exhibition’s themes, and moving through various states of repose, the soundscape encourages the visitor to engage with an embodied sense of rest. 

First created as part of Zeitgeist Irland 24, an initiative of Culture Ireland and the Embassy of Ireland in Germany, libraries of rest challenges a traditional focus on productivity, encouraging us to consider speculative futures centred on collective well-being and relaxation.