Taking its point of departure from Jacques Derrida’s dissertation, The Politics of friendship, Multiplicity is an exhibition of eleven artists, most of whom have direct connections with Ireland, and was originally commissioned for Fota House in Cork in 2004. It is certain that the exhibition divulged different secrets about its theme in Fota’s regency-style House but Monaghan, as a town teetering on the political border of the Republic and Northern Ireland, enriched the interpretations of the curatorial brief with its own history of complex identity. Having said that, it was a breath of fresh air to find in Monaghan questions on the negotiation of friendship in the broadest sense that were eloquent beyond the shackles of the divisive palettes of nationalism and unionism and that truly confronted the mechanics of new internationalism.

Derrida’s ideas on friendship relate to the need to look beyond the restrictions of the nation state whilst working within its sovereignty – very interesting in terms of current, location-specific application. His ideas seek to find new ways of extending hospitality to others outside of our immediate identity without facilitating an abuse of our own space and identity. In our own hearts and minds we are divided by overlapping incongruous identities of, for example, nation, religion, society, culture, ethnicity, sexuality, and even football. Add to this the exchange and mixture of individuals in a whole community or society and we arrive at a cosmopolitan position of complexity of identity. Then, challenge this identity by positioning it against other external identities that do not agree and we have the crux of Derrida’s questions on the agenda for negotiating friendship. How can we negotiate the unconditional status of welcoming ‘the other’ under the imperative friendship of new internationalism when we have in ourselves conflicting identities?

Regarding Derrida’s philosophy, the pluralism referenced in Multiplicity’s selection of artworks would appear to have been concerned with the yin and yang of ‘us’ or ‘I’ and ‘the other’, ie in all of us there is a drop of our opposite and so that which may be intolerable in ‘the other’ is likely part of that which we fight with in ourselves. It initially appeared that there was no single visual, theoretical, or practical thread that held all of the eleven separate artworks together. The concept of nationality that appeared to have been obvious turned out to have been tenuous. These works did not form any diametrically opposing positions. They did not challenge each other; if anything, they were indifferent to each other in a similar way as passengers in a queue at any international airport. Because of this deferential singularity, this suite of artworks precisely reflects the complicity of multiple identities in the context of new internationalism.

Vanessa O’Reilly’s video, Eddy, suggests that who we are is amplified in death, and that the shape of the void we leave in the world after we die in some part defines us. The video’s narrator takes the viewer on a guided tour of massive adjoining graveyards in Havana and we see monotone elaborate and primitive tombs that are stripped of the colours of life, with boxes of exhumed bones stacked in the style of a macabre Cash ‘n’ Carry. The tour guide acts as a registrar of truths where people’s stories live on in his recounting of their lives or, more specifically, the politics of the circumstances of their death.

George Bolster’s beautifully crafted Religion becoming myth installation fights against the inherited identity of religion. This double-sided image of a Christ-like figure tied to a wooden cross is pierced with golden arrows that enter on one side and protrude on the other. Taut silk ribbons stream from the arrow wounds and seem to root the situation to the floor. The image is made with wooden inlay and is polished to perfection – as if with love – but it screams with the affliction of being tied to the thing that chokes you; in this instance, religion.

Linda Denis’s untitled portraits of dishevelled figures in period dress, who appear to be disappointed to the point of resignation, fight against something related to the division of social classes, while Declan Clarke’s Henry the Fifth video of Shakespearian reference focuses on the sometimes illogical nature of national and territorial history combined with the habit of human nature to return to or to relive our histories. In the context of multiplicity, Breda Lynch’s pencil drawings of twins as children and as adults appear to express a disharmony in the inescapable halved identity of twins similar to Derrida’s observation that the problem with ‘the other’ is connected to the problem of ourselves in the first person singular. Ashling and Deirdre and Ashley and Jessica seem to look at the uniqueness of who we are in the rear-view mirror with the discolouration of selective memory and the knowledge of hindsight.

Lynch’s idea of inescapable identity is continued in Niamh McCann’s video Suspension. We see a tree with the legs and flip-flop bedecked feet of a suspended body gently wavering in the air which looks like someone hanging from or clinging to a branch. Similar to George Bolster’s perspective, McCann confronts us with the perverse notion of clutching on to that which strangles us and the intricate politics involved in negotiating that which we are and that which we choose to be.

In this context, Kim Keever’s Wheel piece video of a constructed desolate landscape can be interpreted as taking a last look at the destruction inflicted by the annihilating hospitality of a friendship that integrates ‘the other’ by means of wiping out difference. David Krippendorff’s video continues on this noxious trail with his incendiary cocktail of sex, eroticism and politics. A black-and-white negative, Rita Hayworth-type minx moves in raw suggestions of sexual pleasure that peaks with digitally manipulated orange explosions of flames from her mouth. Hayworth was both star and victim of the silver screen and this video appears to make specific reference to her image having been painted on the side of the first U.S. atomic bomb tested in the 1940s.