Multimedia exhibition re-imagines Oscar Wilde’s home

Posted on: 04 September 2018

A multimedia exhibition featuring a re-imagining of Wilde’s house in London based on the writings of Wilde’s nephew Arthur Cravan  is currently on display in Trinity’s Oscar Wilde Centre for Irish Writing.

Entitled, The House of Oscar Wilde, the exhibition is a mise en scène based on Cravan’s meticulous description of Wilde’s House. The art project is a tribute to Arthur Cravan (born in 1887, Lausanne, Switzerland, disappeared on a sailboat in 1918 off the coast of Salina Cruz, Mexico) who was a poet, a pugilist, an iconic figure for the Dada movement, and, last but not least, Oscar Wilde’s nephew. Created by an anonymous artist the piece is curated by Vladimir Dotsenko, Assistant Professor, School of Mathematics, Trinity.

Oscar Wilde was much more than a distant family member to Cravan, not merely the uncle he never met: he became a role model, a figure whose steps he needed to follow. The hunt of the ghost of Oscar Wilde later became a fundamental part of Cravan’s own work. The House of Oscar Wilde multimedia project incorporates a mise en scène based on Cravan’s writings, live performances, as well as a film screening.

Cravan’s writings that served as inspiration for this work were published in 1917 in the fourth issue of the New York avant-garde magazine The Soil which was almost entirely dedicated to Wilde. It contains a number of “documents never published before”, including a piece about Wilde’s house in London, attributed by Cravan to his father. This text includes an extremely precise description, illustrated by two sketches, indicating the location of each piece of furniture, painting, and decoration objects in the writer’s house. Since there are not enough documents or photographs that allow us to recreate the space and the objects that surrounded Wilde’s daily existence, Cravan’s texts, despite being a work of fiction, constitute an artefact of first importance offering us, the readers, a starting point for imagining it.

Materialising things that Cravan once imagined is a fitting artistic concept to mark the centenary of his disappearance. The exhibition takes place in House 21 in Westland Row where Oscar Wilde was born. More than merely highlighting this lesser known Dublin landmark, the fact that this Dublin location serves as the space for an exhibition re-imagining Wilde’s house in London creates a beautiful resonance with the celebrated installation in Hugh Lane Gallery where Francis Bacon’s London studio is re-created.

This project embodies a collective effort of many people around the world, including craftswomen in Mexico, an artist from Colombia, a translator from the US, a writer from the Netherlands, and an Irish actress. The artist who conceived this project specialises in anonymous ephemeral art events. Previous locations where his artistic actions took place include Barcelona, Naples, Tel Aviv, Mexico City and Amsterdam.

The exhibition is showing at Trinity Oscar Wilde Centre for Irish Writing from the 30^th of August and runs until September 6th with live performances on the 4^th and 5^th of September, followed by a closing film screening and discussion on the 7^th of September. More information is available on the webpage of the project: https://www.facebook.com/houseofoscarwilde/