Visual artist Alice Rekab told David Hennessy about their project Let Me Know You Who I Am that has engaged with groups of young people in Dublin, Liverpool and now Edinburgh to contemplate the issue of identity. Alice’s work features at Edinburgh Art Festival that starts this week.
The UK’s largest annual festival of visual art has returned to Edinburgh with a packed programme of exhibitions, events, and collaborations taking place across the city for the three week festival — the biggest of its kind in the UK.
One artist to feature is Dublin artist, Alice Rekab.
Alice Rekab’s Let Me Show You Who I Am unfolds across billboards, examining legacies of migration and strategies of survival within the family unit, with a focus on intergenerational experiences of Irish, Black and Mixed-Race life
Developed as part of the EAF Civic Programme, it is a two-part project that delves into themes of diaspora, migration, and Irish and Black identity.
The artworks in their first iterations have been created through a series of workshops with young people in Dublin and then Liverpool, exploring black and Irish legacies of community activism and creativity.
Co-created with the Score Scotladn Young People in Wester Hailes, these works in development will bring a new iteration of billboards to Edinburgh that reflect on the artist’s Irish, Sierra Leonean, and Syrian family histories, creating powerful visual narratives of belonging and identity between Ireland and Scotland.
The artworks will be shown publicly in August on billboards across Wishaw Terrace and around the city.
This project begins an ongoing series of work with EAF Civic Programme and Alice Rekab.
Alice Rekab told The Irish World: “The project that I developed with Edinburgh Art Festival was based on a piece that I developed initially with an organisation called Super Project.
“Super Project specifically commissioned me to make an event in the form of workshops for young people specifically in primary schools.
“I identified the age group of sixth class in Ireland, around 11, 12 just before they go to secondary school: A really important time to engage children in conversations around who they are, where they come from and belonging in contemporary Ireland at that time.
“And part of this was also, of course, to include other artists from different backgrounds in Ireland.
“I used my invitation as an invitation to bring other artists with different experiences on board to create a series of workshops that lasted across three days intensively, and different art forms as well.
“I had a dancer, storyteller, a musician and myself who works in sculpture come in and talk, not like a teaching thing where we show them how to do things but actually talk about what being an artist meant to us in terms of self expression and as a way of kind of taking care of yourself and processing experiences and all these things that art is useful for on a personal level.
“Because we’re often asked, What’s art good for? There’s a very negative like, ‘Is art really worth it?’
“As an artist, and particularly as someone of mixed Irish heritage- My dad is from Sierra Leone and my mum is Irish- I grew up in Ireland and a Gaelgoir with a very strong sense of Irish identity.
“I was thinking about how being an artist helped me understand and still does help me understand, navigate that and then create, through the presentation of my work, a space where other people can have another view of what it might mean to be Irish and think about their own relationships with their identity as Irish people as well.
“That’s central for the theme of the work.
“That was the first iteration in Adamstown Educate Together School in Dublin.
“Then I was invited to do that for a second time here in Liverpool, where I am today.
“And from Liverpool then Kim McAleese, who is the director of Edinburgh Art Festival, invited me to come and do an iteration of it in Edinburgh and that’s kind of the journey of the project in the UK.
“The two versions I’ve done, I’ve worked with a slightly different group of artists.
“There was the introduction of the Irish language and artists working specifically in the Irish language coming to the island of Britain and thinking about what it is then to be Irish in England.
“When I’m doing this work in Ireland, the Irish part is the given part because we’re all in Ireland and we are all identifying as Irish in different ways but to come to the UK and do this type of work is then to talk about kind of nascent Irish identities in places like Liverpool and Edinburgh, the connection of the Irish language and this idea of speaking of the Irish language as this act of annunciating your identity and connecting with your identity as specific and different.
“To be Irish in England is also a very different experience.
“I lived in the UK for seven years.
“I did all my post grad in London and really that sense of like, ‘I’m not the same. I’m kind of the same, but I’m not quite the same’.
“And what are the things that make me feel different when I live here?
“It’s almost harder to articulate what it is to be Irish in UK because there’s so much that is the same and they often think of us being the same and we kind of know that we’re not and finding ways of explaining that, the specificity and the nuance of that is also something that’s quite important.
“And so I saw this as an opportunity, invited to Liverpool and invited to Edinburgh, to kind of question that a little bit and to question it not just from my own experience but also through the experiences of other artists and to have them ultimately share their culture in a new context.
“Particularly in Liverpool there will be a lot of kids that we work with that had an Irish grandparent and in Scotland, the Irish language and the Gaelic language were something that they were aware of but not in the same way and we had interesting conversations around how Gaelic is a part of their life or not.
“Score Scotland work with young people of migrant heritage from all over the world and so discussing the relationship that their other countries that they come from would have to the United Kingdom and Ireland also became a talking point and a point of resonance so experiences of colonisation, the connection to the UK, the feeling of belonging but not belonging, all these things that are also resonant experiences with Irish immigrants in the UK.
“And so all of these things became really powerful points of engagement and discussion.
“Also a lot of the time, they didn’t really know that Ireland also had this relationship and that Irish people also had these types of experiences and so that was also a really important piece of work in terms of representation and articulation of Irish identity in the UK and those were the fruits of that experience.
“And then I developed a series of three billboard works that will be launched as part of the Art Festival in August.
“For me as an artist, it was really important that the youth didn’t feel like they had to make the art for me, you often see this with artists that work with communities or collaborate where somehow the community is also sort of pressured to produce this thing even though that’s my job.
“I really wanted to give them the gift of an experience and to create a situation where artists could share and students could share and participants could share and enjoy some thing, and have a new type of conversation and quite a unique space that art creates where people have the sense of openness and creativity, be inspired by that and then from that, create something that was a gift back to the city and a gift back to the community that had engaged with me and let me in in the ways that they did.
“The second part of the presentation I’m going to make in Edinburgh is a performance and a reading that I do that is basically telling the stories of my two grandmothers.
“It’s a trilingual performance so it’s as Gaeilge, in English and it’s in krio which is my father’s language and it’s Scéal Mo Mhamí Bán and Scéal Mhamí Gorm.
“It’s kind of weaving these two women’s stories.
“They never met each other but there are these experiences that they both shared being women in the world at this particular time.
“For instance my Irish grandmother’s father participated in the civil war in Ireland and she would have very strong memories of that.
“My Sierra Leonean grandmother was evacuated from Freetown in the 90s when the Civil War happened in Sierra Leone.
“They both gave up an awful lot for their families, for me to have the education that I have and it’s sort of thinking about what we inherit, the things that are passed on deliberately, things that we take up just because we absorb them from being around these people and an acknowledgement of their stories and telling of their stories together.”
Has the experience been rewarding?
“It’s been really, really interesting particularly to do it outside of Ireland.
“When I was designing this, I never imagined it would go outside of Ireland.
“I’m 38 so growing up in Ireland, there weren’t many people that had a parent from another country even just from France or something let alone the international kind of community that we have in Ireland now.
“But growing up, we were very much on our own and there wasn’t really any conversation about that because it wasn’t a common experience in Ireland.
“I was thinking about what would have made the difference to me, what would have also made a difference to my classmates understanding my background and also giving them a chance to share.
“The other thing is in the old school system, you weren’t really encouraged to talk about yourself at all.
“You were kind of encouraged to be very quiet and to get on with things so thinking about constructing a moment for them to be able to have a little bit of space, and without pressure, to share.
“I really feel like in all the iterations of this project everyone is moved, even the people that watched us from the Liverpool Biennial, that were kind of sitting in as point of contact for when we were doing the workshop, were kind of getting kind of teary.
“It’s still something that’s people’s stories and particularly connections to their families.
“It’s a very universally important thing, and it’s also complex.
“It’s not always an easy story to tell but I feel like that was something that really kind of gave me a lot of pride and I was really happy that I was able to create that space for that sharing and that vulnerability to be possible and people to feel safe and also to appreciate one another.
“That was something that was just really, really lovely to see and that even the bystanders were engaging with it in that way.
“That was a really lovely moment to see the power of that simple thing.
“The project is called Let Me Show You Who I Am and it is that idea of giving someone the space to tell you who they are rather than be told who they are by everybody else.
“Especially when you’re young, people are always telling you so this idea of letting the child or a young person speak for themselves and on their own terms, that felt really rewarding and powerful and worthwhile.
“The way we start the workshops, we ask each of the young people to bring something from their home that tells a story about them.
“That’s often how we start the conversation.
“One guy brought in his saxophone and one girl brought in a little icon of the Virgin Mary that she had been given by her grandmother so you get these really intimate, very special little things that mean something and that also involves this conversation with the parents, like, ‘What will I bring in?’
“That’s a really good starting point.
“Then also they’re talking about the objects rather than feeling like they have to talk about themselves straight away and that opens things up but it also creates this kind of idea that things outside of you can help you talk about what’s inside.
“I think that’s a really important thing with art as well.
“It’s something that we make outside of ourselves but it helps us, I guess, grapple with and express about the inside.”
Were you isolated as a mixed race person in Ireland at the time you were growing up?
“Yeah.
“I think there were two other people in my whole school but they weren’t in my same class or anything, there was definitely no one with Sierra Leonean heritage.
“There’s still very few people of Sierra Leonean heritage in Ireland other than my own family.
“I remember really distinctly when I was growing up, anyone black that I met was someone that was either a relative or someone that we knew.
“Then I remember distinctly being 12, 13, years old and starting to see other black people in Ireland and feeling really great about it.
“I felt that we weren’t on our own anymore.
“I think that feeling of turning something that wasn’t always a positive experience, answering that question ‘Where are you from?’ into a positive experience through the artwork is definitely inspired.”
Would you do more of this work?
“Yeah, Let Me Show You Who I Am is a model that can be deployed anywhere.
“It’s definitely a project I would continue and it’s different every time because everyone I work with is different.
“Every School or youth group is different.
Edinburgh Arts Festival runs until 24 August.
For more information, click here.
For more information about Alice, click here.