This is a past exhibition.

Jesse Jones’ film, performance and sculptural installation, The Tower, was the second part in a trilogy beginning with Tremble Tremble (commissioned for the Irish Pavilion at the 57th Venice Biennale in 2017). 

The Tower finds its beginning point not in the witch but the heretic; it conjures the words of women burned as heretics before the first witch trials in the sixteenth century. Jones’ work delves into the lost knowledge of women’s ecstatic visions through the writing and song of medieval female Christian mystics, and evokes the strange, isolated imaginaries of anchorites and hermits along with troubling histories of religious and state incarceration of women.

Collaborating with performers Olwen Fouéré and Naomi Moonveld-Nkosi, choreographers Junk Ensemble and a girls’ choir, Jones transports us into the tower. A giant pillar reflects the life of devoted ascetic Simeon the Stylite, who waited on top of a pillar for six years to prove his devotion to God. Jones’ pillar – the tower – proclaims the possibility of a world without shame and aims to reclaim the radical and mystical potential apparent in many women writers of the fourteenth century, crushed by the witch trials, the rise of capitalism and the weaponization of shame. 

The Tower looks to a moment of radical potential in a durational performed installation.

Commissioned by Rua Red as part of The Magdalene Series and funded by The Arts Council of Ireland, Creative Ireland and South Dublin Country Arts Office. Supported at Talbot Rice Gallery by Culture Ireland, Creative Scotland and Edinburgh College of Art.