Curating Hatred: The Joe McWilliams's Controversy at the Ulster Museum

Tom Maguire

doi:10.33972/jhs.134

Abstract

Since heritage is a manifestation of how the past is used in the present,engagement with heritage is a critical indicator of how contemporaryhatreds play out, both feeding and feeding off traditions and legacies.Despite its ongoing peace process, Northern Ireland remains a site of dissonantheritages, where sectarian hatred continues to be expressed in societaldivisions, often resulting in outright violence. This relationship betweencurrent expressions of hatred and the uses of the past present particularissues for heritage professionals. This essay examines a recent example inwhich these tensions have been made manifest, the inclusion of a paintingby Belfast artist Joe McWilliams in the Annual Exhibition by the RoyalUlster Academy at the Ulster Museum in 2015. The painting depicts theperformance by a Protestant Orange Order band outside a Roman CatholicChurch in Belfast as part of the annual Twelfth of July celebrations. Itincluded a small group of figures wearing white hoods, akin to the KluKlux Klan’s, and Orange sashes. The controversy that the inclusion of thispainting in the exhibition sparked illustrates the ways in which the artisticrepresentation of a performed heritage challenges institutional practice incurating dissonance.

Highlights

Since, as David Harvey suggests, heritage “has always been produced by people according to their contemporary concerns and experiences” (2001: 320), engagement with the past is a critical indicator of how contemporary hatreds play out, both feeding and feeding off traditions and legacies
Northern Ireland, enjoying an uneasy peace since the Belfast Agreement of 1998, continues to be a site where sectarian hatred is expressed in societal divisions over dissonant heritages, on occasion resulting in outright violence
In 2014, commenting on the Art of the Troubles exhibition, the Belfast Telegraph’s Fionola Meredith suggested that a double distancing of artistic rendition and galleried display was being used as a tactic to defuse the potential dissonance of the heritage depicted: I have a sneaking suspicion that the museum thinks that approaching the Troubles obliquely, through the medium of art, is a safer way to get to grips with it

Summary

Introduction

As David Harvey suggests, heritage “has always been produced by people according to their contemporary concerns and experiences” (2001: 320), engagement with the past is a critical indicator of how contemporary hatreds play out, both feeding and feeding off traditions and legacies. It is the status of the Museum as a national institution that is critical since it engages the broader concerns of Unionists at the changed relationship between the Northern Ireland state and Protestant culture more generally.

Results

Conclusion