Yarli Allison - Missing Chicken_Assembling with Open Mouths

Missing Chicken_Assembling with Open Mouths
A film by Yarli Allison
Video Duration: 15:15
H.264 Video with audio
Northern Ireland
2018

STILLS:

Missing Chicken_Assembling with Open Mouths is a film part of Yarli's solo art installation Larval commissioned for Sion Stables Museum, Northern Ireland.

Larval is the third edition of the serial exhibitions of [backspace], a project which questions Derry’s stances on change, preservation, and identity. Here at Sion Stables, the proximate space once used for keeping horses is explored for its symbolic associations with dependency, domestication and nurturing. These earlier statuses of comfort are revisited as artist Yarli Allison traces back towards her own childhood memories to compose a new past. A memoir is rewritten, telling the story of a chicken protagonist and their disappearance.

The metaphor of “disappearance” is not coincidental to the evaporation of the linen village in Sion Mills. Yarli responds to the history of this region with a video and site-specific sculptural intervention created for the Stables. Spanned across the interior is a cluster of ties which inquires the action of binding and chaining from the singular into the formation of a robust and pliable mass. The notion of reliance and mobility are also addressed as the thematics of the video work. Mobility - the ability to move around and even to navigate through social and economic environments, often has a primal connection with the reaction to/from danger.

As the sense of belonging is a frequent topic in her artistic practice, Yarli continues to search for hints and influences on her own definition of belonging in Larval. This new work exhibited here references the use of oral history and asks, can spoken words and verbal conversation be the method of giving shape to and preserving “identity”, whether to the identity of a person or of a place?

Curated and Text by Edy Fung

Funded and supported by

New Spaces 2018, Northern Ireland
Visual Artists Ireland [NI]
Arts Council Lottery Fund
Derry city and Strabane District Council
Video Narrator: Celeste Owens
Original Music: Edy Fung

..... 2019/20