Empty Columns Are a Place to Dream

Monuments are ubiquitous on the landscape. Common and omnipresent, they blend into the background and go unnoticed until someone points them out. In recent years, monuments have become flashpoints of cultural controversy. It wasn't that these monuments weren't being seen, it's that some people in the community weren't hearing what others in the community were saying about them.

In Empty Columns Are a Place to Dream, Ric Kasini Kadour unpacks what monuments are and their role in our communities. He takes the reader on a tour from the Megalithic Temples of Malta to Brú na Bóinne in Ireland to the Confederate monuments of Obion County, Tennessee to the empty column in the center of Birr, County Offaly, Ireland. Kadour asks us to consider monuments as sites of collective memory and as places to reflect upon history, even when that history is false or misleading. He then shows us what happens when collage artists reimagine these spaces as sites of truth and reconciliation.

Empty Columns Are a Place to Dream features the collages of eighteen artists from Austria, Belgium, Canada, Iran, Ireland, Israel, Poland, South Africa, the United States, and the United Kingdom made a series of collages that reimagined the empty column in the center of Birr, County Offaly, Ireland, which, from 1747 to 1915, commemorated the Duke of Cumberland's 1745 victory over the Scots at Culloden, as 21st century beacons of hope and reconciliation.

Featured Artists:
Inas Al-soqi (USA)
Simon Blake (USA)
Kevin Geronimo Brandtner (Austria)
Danielle Cole (Canada)
Caroline F. Conway (Ireland)
David Crunelle (Belgium)
Lynne Hoare (Ireland)
Marta Janik (Poland)
Ric Kasini Kadour (Canada/USA)
Anthony D Kelly (Ireland)
Christopher Kurts (USA)
Duduetsang Lamola (South Africa)
Rashad Muhammad (USA)
Mark Murphy (United Kingdom)
Ashley Pryor (USA)
Elyana Shamselangeroodi (Iran)
Avi Yair (Israel)
Denise Zygadlo (United Kingdom)

Text by Ric Kasini Kadour

Details: 2021 | 9"x6" | ISBN 978-1-927587-55-3