Beyond the troubles
A major rethink of Ulster Museum’s approach to a troubled past is paying off, says Patrick Kelly
Why would an original print of an iconic poster of Che Guevara earn pride of place in an exhibition devoted to the Troubles in Northern Ireland? The print, now on show at the Ulster Museum in Belfast, was created by Derry-born artist Jim Fitzpatrick in 1968. Based on Alberto Korda’s photograph of the Cuban revolutionary, the ubiquitous poster has adorned millions of student bedrooms ever since.
But its inclusion owes less to the birthplace of the artist than to the date Fitzpatrick created it – 1968 was the year the Northern Ireland Troubles began, when a banned civil rights march was attacked by the police in Derry, ushering in nearly four decades of violent conflict that claimed more than 3,500 lives and bitterly divided the Catholic and Protestant communities.
“The image is one way of placing the Troubles in the context of the era of civil rights demonstrations and student marches that were happening all over Europe and the US at the same time,” says William Blair, the director of collections at National Museums Northern Ireland.
It will also remind visitors that Northern Ireland’s problems were set against a background of huge social change, he adds. The Che poster is just one of a new collection of objects that will mark a revamp of Ulster Museum’s Troubles gallery, which originally opened when the building was redeveloped in 2009. At the time, the gallery, which attempted to look at the recent troubled history of Northern Ireland through contemporary newspaper headlines and archive television footage, was widely criticised as dull. Audiences were turned off by the neutral journalistic narrative and there were few original artefacts or alternative perspectives.
A major rethink of the museum’s approach was required and, with the aid of a £370,000 grant from the Heritage Lottery Fund’s Collecting Cultures Strand, that’s exactly what is happening. The money supports a scheme called Collecting the Troubles and Beyond, which includes a curator and a collection fund.
Local perspective
Having a dedicated member of staff has been critical to the success of the project. Curator Karen Logan has been liaising with community groups, local libraries and schools in unionist and nationalist communities, explaining the project, hearing their stories and gathering donated objects. She has also reached out to Northern Ireland’s ethnic minority communities through the Ballymena Inter-Ethnic Forum and the Chinese Welfare Association. The idea is that the relationship the gallery has with the community should be reciprocal, says Logan. “We are working together to establish the significance of events through workshops and dialogue. It’s an important element of co-production in the project.”
Logan has used the work of local photographers such as Martin Nangle, who has been chronicling the impact of de-industrialisation in Northern Ireland since the 1970s. His pictures, mounted in travelling exhibitions around Northern Ireland, show that the massive changes to the urban landscape in Belfast, Derry and other towns happened not because of the conflict, but because of the redevelopment of inner city areas, common across the UK and western Europe. “The exhibition shows that housing policy had more impact than the riots,” says Logan.
Feedback from the people taking part has been positive, she adds. “I have been pleasantly surprised at the willingness of people to get involved. It was almost as if there had been an expectation that the museum would do something like this.”
Among the objects that have come from local people are drawings, badges, medals, football shirts, a hi-vis vest from someone acting as a steward at the most recent “flag protests”, flyers from cross-community police programmes, and artworks by an artist who uses old and tattered flags as found materials. Contacts with the lesbian and gay community have also provided material for the gallery, including items from Queerspace, an LGBT group that has tracked attitudes towards homosexuality in Northern Ireland.
These have been supplemented by artefacts bought at auction, including Spitting Image puppets of Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams and former secretary of state for Northern Ireland and New Labour guru Peter Mandelson. Other items herald the arrival of punk music in Belfast and Derry, which spawned celebrated bands such as the Undertones and Stiff Little Fingers.
“This was all happening at the same time as the Troubles and they meant as much to people at the time,” says Blair.
Owning the past
The revamped gallery will explore the deeper social context and creative expressions of music, literature, film and sport that ran in parallel with political developments in the 1970s, 80s and 90s, says Blair. One event in the programme, devoted to the theme Alternative Ulster, was a nod to a celebrated Stiff Little Fingers track and to the alternative punk lifestyle where Catholic and Protestant youth could mix freely in bars and clubs.
The new gallery will not have a “big bang” relaunch, says Blair, but a “phased evolution” that will see new cases installed gradually using items donated by people taking part in the workshops. People’s memories of the Troubles are also being recorded and will form part of the exhibition. “It’s an open-ended conversation,” he says. “We wanted to avoid giving the impression that a new exhibition had all the answers. Our aim is not to show that the museum has a unique insight, but that we can create a framework to reflect the diversity of people’s experiences.
“Museums are not simply about the past, but also the present and the future,” adds Blair. “Post-conflict interpretation of the Troubles in Northern Ireland requires a sensitive awareness of the relationship between all three.”
Graham Black, a professor at Nottingham Trent University, is an adviser on the Collecting the Troubles project and has been an advocate of the democratisation of museums. He describes the original gallery as dire, but the new approach “is of international significance in that it is tackling the wider question of ‘how on earth do you respond to contentious histories?’”.
The aim is “to look at what communities think happened rather than what actually happened”. That’s not to say you can simply cede the authority of expertise, Black says, but you can make the gallery “authoritative without being authoritarian”.
The first step in engaging communities in the story of the Troubles, he says, is to make people’s comments integral to the display. “There are one and a half million experts on the Troubles so this has to be a conversation with them.”
He points to the success of the Silent Testimony exhibition at the museum in 2015, when artist Colin Davidson painted a series of portraits of people who had suffered during the conflict. This had a huge impact because it encouraged ordinary people to relate their experiences.
Previously silenced or marginalised groups should be able to reclaim ownership of their own pasts and communities, says Black. Those pasts should be represented centrally in museum displays and their voices heard through their inclusion.
Reconciliation effort
Creating shared spaces is the reason why the Northern Ireland Community Relations Council (NICRC), a state-funded body, is backing the Collecting the Troubles project. NICRC’s mission is to promote better relations between Protestants and Catholics. As part of its brief, it encourages other organisations to develop a community relations aspect to their policies and practices, and sees the gallery as an important aspect of its efforts.
“Museums have the vital task of reflecting and reframing debates on key issues and events, through demonstrating a commitment to plural voices, encouraging active engagement with the stories and experiences of self and of others,” says Deirdre MacBride, the cultural diversity director of the NICRC.
The Ulster Museum project is “a unique opportunity to create a space in which dialogue and understanding about the Troubles can occur”, MacBride adds. In that space, it’s possible that “reconciliation can emerge even while we are dealing with hurtful living memory”.
Centenaries – the series of cataclysmic events that shaped the course of Irish history from 1912 to 1922. These include the first world war and the Easter Rising in 1916, as well as the partition of Ireland into two states in 1922. As part of its programme of events, the organisation hosted a discussion involving Northern Ireland’s smaller local authority museums.
“It shouldn’t just be about the major institutions,” says MacBride. “There’s lots of good work going on at grassroots level.”
Patrick Kelly is a freelance writer
But its inclusion owes less to the birthplace of the artist than to the date Fitzpatrick created it – 1968 was the year the Northern Ireland Troubles began, when a banned civil rights march was attacked by the police in Derry, ushering in nearly four decades of violent conflict that claimed more than 3,500 lives and bitterly divided the Catholic and Protestant communities.
“The image is one way of placing the Troubles in the context of the era of civil rights demonstrations and student marches that were happening all over Europe and the US at the same time,” says William Blair, the director of collections at National Museums Northern Ireland.
It will also remind visitors that Northern Ireland’s problems were set against a background of huge social change, he adds. The Che poster is just one of a new collection of objects that will mark a revamp of Ulster Museum’s Troubles gallery, which originally opened when the building was redeveloped in 2009. At the time, the gallery, which attempted to look at the recent troubled history of Northern Ireland through contemporary newspaper headlines and archive television footage, was widely criticised as dull. Audiences were turned off by the neutral journalistic narrative and there were few original artefacts or alternative perspectives.
A major rethink of the museum’s approach was required and, with the aid of a £370,000 grant from the Heritage Lottery Fund’s Collecting Cultures Strand, that’s exactly what is happening. The money supports a scheme called Collecting the Troubles and Beyond, which includes a curator and a collection fund.
Local perspective
Having a dedicated member of staff has been critical to the success of the project. Curator Karen Logan has been liaising with community groups, local libraries and schools in unionist and nationalist communities, explaining the project, hearing their stories and gathering donated objects. She has also reached out to Northern Ireland’s ethnic minority communities through the Ballymena Inter-Ethnic Forum and the Chinese Welfare Association. The idea is that the relationship the gallery has with the community should be reciprocal, says Logan. “We are working together to establish the significance of events through workshops and dialogue. It’s an important element of co-production in the project.”
Logan has used the work of local photographers such as Martin Nangle, who has been chronicling the impact of de-industrialisation in Northern Ireland since the 1970s. His pictures, mounted in travelling exhibitions around Northern Ireland, show that the massive changes to the urban landscape in Belfast, Derry and other towns happened not because of the conflict, but because of the redevelopment of inner city areas, common across the UK and western Europe. “The exhibition shows that housing policy had more impact than the riots,” says Logan.
Feedback from the people taking part has been positive, she adds. “I have been pleasantly surprised at the willingness of people to get involved. It was almost as if there had been an expectation that the museum would do something like this.”
Among the objects that have come from local people are drawings, badges, medals, football shirts, a hi-vis vest from someone acting as a steward at the most recent “flag protests”, flyers from cross-community police programmes, and artworks by an artist who uses old and tattered flags as found materials. Contacts with the lesbian and gay community have also provided material for the gallery, including items from Queerspace, an LGBT group that has tracked attitudes towards homosexuality in Northern Ireland.
These have been supplemented by artefacts bought at auction, including Spitting Image puppets of Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams and former secretary of state for Northern Ireland and New Labour guru Peter Mandelson. Other items herald the arrival of punk music in Belfast and Derry, which spawned celebrated bands such as the Undertones and Stiff Little Fingers.
“This was all happening at the same time as the Troubles and they meant as much to people at the time,” says Blair.
Owning the past
The revamped gallery will explore the deeper social context and creative expressions of music, literature, film and sport that ran in parallel with political developments in the 1970s, 80s and 90s, says Blair. One event in the programme, devoted to the theme Alternative Ulster, was a nod to a celebrated Stiff Little Fingers track and to the alternative punk lifestyle where Catholic and Protestant youth could mix freely in bars and clubs.
The new gallery will not have a “big bang” relaunch, says Blair, but a “phased evolution” that will see new cases installed gradually using items donated by people taking part in the workshops. People’s memories of the Troubles are also being recorded and will form part of the exhibition. “It’s an open-ended conversation,” he says. “We wanted to avoid giving the impression that a new exhibition had all the answers. Our aim is not to show that the museum has a unique insight, but that we can create a framework to reflect the diversity of people’s experiences.
“Museums are not simply about the past, but also the present and the future,” adds Blair. “Post-conflict interpretation of the Troubles in Northern Ireland requires a sensitive awareness of the relationship between all three.”
Graham Black, a professor at Nottingham Trent University, is an adviser on the Collecting the Troubles project and has been an advocate of the democratisation of museums. He describes the original gallery as dire, but the new approach “is of international significance in that it is tackling the wider question of ‘how on earth do you respond to contentious histories?’”.
The aim is “to look at what communities think happened rather than what actually happened”. That’s not to say you can simply cede the authority of expertise, Black says, but you can make the gallery “authoritative without being authoritarian”.
The first step in engaging communities in the story of the Troubles, he says, is to make people’s comments integral to the display. “There are one and a half million experts on the Troubles so this has to be a conversation with them.”
He points to the success of the Silent Testimony exhibition at the museum in 2015, when artist Colin Davidson painted a series of portraits of people who had suffered during the conflict. This had a huge impact because it encouraged ordinary people to relate their experiences.
Previously silenced or marginalised groups should be able to reclaim ownership of their own pasts and communities, says Black. Those pasts should be represented centrally in museum displays and their voices heard through their inclusion.
Our aim is not to show that the museum has a unique insight, but to reflect the diversity of people’s experiences”
Reconciliation effort
Creating shared spaces is the reason why the Northern Ireland Community Relations Council (NICRC), a state-funded body, is backing the Collecting the Troubles project. NICRC’s mission is to promote better relations between Protestants and Catholics. As part of its brief, it encourages other organisations to develop a community relations aspect to their policies and practices, and sees the gallery as an important aspect of its efforts.
“Museums have the vital task of reflecting and reframing debates on key issues and events, through demonstrating a commitment to plural voices, encouraging active engagement with the stories and experiences of self and of others,” says Deirdre MacBride, the cultural diversity director of the NICRC.
The Ulster Museum project is “a unique opportunity to create a space in which dialogue and understanding about the Troubles can occur”, MacBride adds. In that space, it’s possible that “reconciliation can emerge even while we are dealing with hurtful living memory”.
Centenaries – the series of cataclysmic events that shaped the course of Irish history from 1912 to 1922. These include the first world war and the Easter Rising in 1916, as well as the partition of Ireland into two states in 1922. As part of its programme of events, the organisation hosted a discussion involving Northern Ireland’s smaller local authority museums.
“It shouldn’t just be about the major institutions,” says MacBride. “There’s lots of good work going on at grassroots level.”
Patrick Kelly is a freelance writer