C111 review

Seán Hillen: The executioners , 1989, collage; courtesy the artist

Within the framework of the Month of the Photo in Paris, some thirty photomontages by Seán Hillen, exhibited at the Centre Culturel Irlandais, bear testimony to his aesthetic, political and personal engagements. Born in 1961 in a working-class Catholic neighbourhood in Newry, Hillen witnessed the turmoil and tragedies of Northern Ireland. Even though his exhibitions have been censored twice in London, he has not ceased to employ his photographic oeuvre in a work of memory, via series of small-dimension photomontages such as LondoNewry , Four ideas for a new town , or The professionals .

Avoiding any didacticism or political sermonising, Hillen's works reveal a world which is as much personal as visionary. Drawing from collective imagination and memory, he makes, for example, Christ appear, giving blessings, above a town besieged by security forces under an apocalyptic sky. In an irreverent vein, he subverts representations of power, as in Trouble in paradise (1987), where masked militants of the Irish National Liberation Army parade alongside the Queen's mounted guard! All the same, the artist's universe is imprinted with nostalgia for a lost Eden and with anguish towards a present seized in anarchy. Thus, in Meeting the dead #2 , an anatomical écorché, shown in a classical pose, is looking at a burnt-out lorry which stands out against a backdrop of mournful mountains.

Seán Hillen: Newry Gagarin, #11 , 1992, collage; courtesy the artist

Finally, in his series Newry Gagarin , Hillen identifies with his alter ego, Yuri Gagarin, the first man in space, who came back to earth scarcely an hour after the artist's birth. The cosmonaut often appears as a 'Martian' in face of the absurd world of his contemporaries.

The violence of the images contrasts with the delicacy and minute detail of the procedure employed: original documents - cut with a scalpel under a binocular microscope - mix with collages of postcards, of heroes from sensational comic-book or television series. Hillen thus transcends and subverts the traditional tool of propaganda in order better to reveal the complexity of history, which cannot be understood in any Manichean manner. His plays on meaning, half-subversive, half-surreal, display in the end the fragility of the human condition faced with the traumas of history. His photomontages bear witness to a precarious balance between memory and forgetting. The healing of the wounds will be long, as will the work of collective memory.

Soko Phay-Vakalis is an art critic and Associate professor at the Department of Fine Arts of Paris 8 University.

Seán Hillen: Photomontages 1983 -1993 , Centre Culturel Irlandais, Paris, November -?December 2004; organised in collaboration with the Gallery of Photography, Dublin

Article reproduced from CIRCA 111, Spring 2005, pp.80-81