LIVESTOCK: Viral – The Keening iv – Day Magee
Presented Online on 8 May 2021
Artist: Day Magee
Curated by Dr Katherine Nolan and Francis Fay
In association with: Bealtaine Festival
‘The Male Keening (vi)’ was the first of a series of three live streamed performance art events with leading artists Olivia Hassett, Day Magee and El Putnam, exploring the vulnerability of the human body as part of an ecology both human and animal.
The pandemic puts a focus on the body, highlighting our frailties, forcing us to question our assumptions about who and what is vulnerable. With social distancing as the new norm we are propelled to create new forms of intimacy, social relations and endurance.
‘The Male Keening (vi)’ by Day Magee was presented in association with Pallas Projects.
Day Magee performed a male variant of the Keening, having completed the cycle of patriarchal grief.
About the Artist
Day Magee is a genderqueer performance and visual artist based in Dublin. Since 2011, they have performed as part of live art organisations such as LIVESTOCK and the Dublin Live Art Festival, before pursuing a BA in Sculpture & Combined Media in Limerick School of Art & Design in 2017. During time in LSAD they staged group live art events, and by third year exhibited work: as part of Galway’s Tulca Festival 2019; group shows in Dublin and Manhattan; as well as being put forward for the Future Generation Art Prize 2020 by Pallas Projects Studios.
Day’s work concerns the subjectivity of a queer sick body: queerness navigated via fundamentalist Christianity; sickness as manifest in chronic pain; the body being the site of self-conception as well as the instrument of self-reproduction. Experience acts as the dynamo, and the ensuing emotional interiority is the well from which I draw. My life is a question, and my work is its answer.
Commissioned by Age & Opportunity as part of the Bealtaine Festival 2021. In partnership with LIVESTOCK and funded by the Arts Council.
