Ceangailte

Ceangailte is a new collaborative audiovisual work by Irish artists Jake Riordan and David Mathúna, taking the form of a dramatic narrative arc across a dual-screen display, surrounded by sculptural detritus.

Through a specific examination of media representations and biases, the video work spans historical testimonies, exploring exterior themes of colonialism and oppression, while traversing interior narratives of shared resilience, humorous subversion, and hope.
The word Ceangailte [key-ang-el-ta] comes from the Irish language, Gaeilge. The definitions of which approximate “tied,” “connected,” or “bound.”

Taking as its point of departure the multiplicity of perspectives woven throughout the connected histories of former colonies of Empire, Ceangailte articulates future aspirations while holding a mirror up to an extreme and alienating present, interrogating the contradictions between what is outwardly expressed by establishment media and what is internally pursued by those in power.

Today, the extractive processes of our relentless pursuit of exponential growth are being played out along colonial imprints—and so too are the processes of disinformation which underpin its propagation. Ceangailte serves as an interrogation of a fabricated past, a manufactured present and a future in the process of being stolen, positing that these narratives are not fixed, but are in fact being re-written at this very moment, and that perspectives of former colonies have an intrinsic role to play in their negotiation.

Both satire and polemic, Ceangailte on one hand parodies propaganda—its speed and its voraciousness—making use of appropriative modes of production as a formal montage device, imitating the irreverent extraction at the heart of the colonialist project while caricaturing its methodologies, manipulating public narratives in order to conceal inner agendas.