Borderlines of Memory: ROM 61, KMD, UiB, Bergen
Borderlines of Memory
Eamon O’Kane
ROM 61, KMD, Bergen
Monday 26 – Friday 30 October 2026
Opening times: 10:00–16:00
Short exhibition tour: Thursday 29 October, 09:30–10:00
Borderlines of Memory is a work-in-progress video installation exploring the intersections of personal memory, family history and the political landscape of the Irish border. Rooted in Eamon O’Kane’s childhood at Cavanacor House, near the border between the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland, the work considers how places become repositories of memory, shaped by lived experience, inherited histories and the enduring presence of conflict.
Drawing on family photographs, archival and documentary footage, personal recollections, and interviews with family and friends, O’Kane reconstructs fragments of a past in which the personal and political are inseparable. The work reflects on the experiences of his parents, who studied art in Belfast in the late 1960s before teaching art in Strabane during the 1970s, a period marked by political violence, militarisation and profound social division in Northern Ireland. Their artistic lives, together with the domestic environment in which O’Kane grew up, form an important part of his understanding of art, place and cultural inheritance.
Growing up during the 1970s and 1980s in a militarised border zone meant inhabiting a world in which the conflict was experienced not only through the immediate landscape but also through the constant flow of images and information entering the home. Newspapers, television news reports and documentaries brought distant events into everyday life, creating a continuous interplay between personal experience and the wider political narrative. These accumulated impressions, of violence, surveillance, division and uncertainty, formed a particular psychological and cultural environment in which the ordinary rhythms of childhood coexisted with an ever-present awareness of conflict. Through the layering of personal memories, family photographs and media imagery, the installation attempts to evoke this environment: not simply as a record of historical events, but as an atmosphere absorbed over time, through repetition, association and the gradual formation of memory.
The border emerges not simply as a geographical line, but as a psychological and cultural condition: a presence experienced through roads, landscapes, surveillance structures, family narratives and the boundaries separating communities. It is both a physical reality and an invisible structure shaping how people see, remember and understand the places they inhabit. Through the act of revisiting and reassembling images of the past, the installation explores how memories are formed, transmitted and transformed across generations, and how the meanings of particular places shift as they are revisited from the perspective of the present.
At its heart, Borderlines of Memory examines the relationship between remembering and forgetting, and between individual experience and collective history. It considers how political divisions become embedded in everyday life, shaping personal and familial identities long after particular events have passed. Rather than presenting a definitive account of the past, the installation brings together fragments, impressions and recollections, allowing different forms of evidence and memory to coexist. In doing so, it suggests that artistic practice can open alternative ways of looking at contested places and inherited narratives. The work becomes an exploration of belonging, identity and the complex ways in which the landscapes of childhood continue to shape the landscapes of the mind.
Eamon O’Kane is Professor at the Faculty of Fine Art, Music and Design (KMD), University of Bergen, Norway. An Irish artist born in 1974, he has developed an interdisciplinary practice spanning painting, drawing, sculpture, printmaking, film and installation.
