Beir Abhaile ár Marbh Exhibition Notes

Beir Abhaile ár Marbh is a memorial to 39 Vietnamese people found dead in a truck container in southeast England in October 2019. Two of the dead were only 15, while the oldest was 44. All are believed to have paid people traffickers for their transit into England. The work uses the form of Brâncuși’s Endless Column, a sombre, repetitive touchstone in modern sculpture, to list the names of the dead, their ages and where they were from - a memorial in the vain hope that it will never happen again. Beir Abhaile ár Marbh - Bring home our dead refers both to the difficulty the families had of getting the bodies of their loved ones back to Vietnam and to the 1937 Kirkintilloch disaster when families in Achill endured a similar tragedy. It is not too distant from our own past for us to recognise the human rights of asylum seekers, refugees and migrants today.