Installation and performance artwork, conceptual and Interdisciplinary, Madrid Spain 2019–2022
Ann Burke Daly works at the intersection of poetics, everyday life, spatiotemporal concerns, language, the unconscious, and the socio-political, to create psychologically immersive art installations from fragments of objects, language, images, smells, and sounds, both found and made. Half-Life involves a slowing down of looking and making in the physically demanding, and choreographed collecting of images which are made in a pseudo-forensics method of closeup engagement at the walls of former dictatorship political prisons in Madrid Spain where Daly lived for over three years of a decade. This work is concerned with the problems and difficulties of translation, and is a subjective expression of the experience of being awash in a language and culture not one’s own—the search to understand everyday interactions, history, and events from the position of cultural outsider. This project consists of two parts; performatively shot photographs of seven former dictatorship-era prisons in Madrid, Spain, and gallery installations of the assembled photographic fragments which are pieced together to form an expansive assemblage, without tidy resolution, where seams show — a shadow archive.
