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23 September 2021
'In Roderick Buchanan’s Scots Irish/Irish Scots the installation explores the conflicting allegiances and identities of Northern Irish history by depicting two ideologically opposed flute bands parading within the same city. To make matters even more complex, the bands aren’t even Northern Irish themselves, but hail from Buchanan’s hometown of Glasgow, with its own, deeply entrenched cultural divisions. On the one screen, then, dressed in imperial red, are the Black Skull Corps of Fife and Drum, performing as part of the city’s Loyalist festivities commemorating the 1689 Siege of Londonderry. On the other, clad in more sombrely imposing black, march the Parkland Republican Flute Band, on the anniversary of the 1916 Easter Rising – a more subdued affair, with fewer followers, which culminates in a windswept cemetery and a litany of Republican martyrs. Parallel scenes play concurrently. and you end up with a sense of acute, perpetual conflict: not only between sectarian factions, but also within individuals themselves – between their rigidly performed, culturally circumscribed roles, and their more ambiguous, complex shades of humanity. Magnificent.' Time Out here
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