Artist and curator Niamh McDonnell invited five artists to create diagram artworks in response to two sets of archival documents and reconstruct acts that inscribe the subject’s relation to the state: the signing of the Covenant and Declaration documents at Belfast City Hall in 1912 and the reading of the Proclamation document at the General Post Office, Dublin, in 1916.

McDonnell has provided five artists with sets of instructions for experimenting with the production of reconstructions of the acts of inscription of subject relation to the state: the 1912 signing of the Covenant and Declaration Documents at Belfast City Hall and the 1916 reading of the Proclamation at Dublin General Post Office. Robin Price has created a screen-based display that generates different ways of spatially organizing the material data of the Covenant and Declaration document signatures in real time. eegb (Edmund Eva and George Baldwin) have programmed a drawing machine that re-describes the data generated on the screen display of digitized signatures by following different algorithmic instructions. Maxim Surin has made a pair of video pieces based on following a set of instructions to capture views of the City Hall and the GPO, focusing on describing the architectural surfaces of each building. Robert Anderson has created a series of drawings of fictional bookplates based on ornamental building features and symbolic objects that imagine the architecture of the City Hall and the GPO in a neo-classical style. The exhibition of these diagram artworks represents a proposal for a multimedia installation at the two municipal buildings where the acts of inscription took place – Dublin’s GPO and Belfast City Hall.

This project was sponsored by the British Council and the Department of Arts, Heritage and the Gaeltacht.