Frank Wasser: The Irish Face

'The Irish Face' is a research project that interrogates how Irish identity has been historically constructed, classified, and disciplined within British and European cultural institutions. Its first iteration comprised a site-specific performance and one-day encounter presented in the Library and Archive Reading Rooms at Tate Britain and is the public culmination of Wasser’s artist residency at the site.

At its core, the project critiques the colonial knowledge systems that continue to structure how Irishness—and national identity more broadly—is organised and rendered legible. Rather than treating institutional classification as neutral, the project exposes its reliance on imperial epistemologies: frameworks developed to measure, rank, and contain cultural subjects within hierarchies that served the political needs of the colonial state.

The research draws from multiple sites and narratives, including the legacy of Derry-Londonderry’s Orchard Gallery; the carceral history of Millbank Prison—the former panopticon on which Tate Britain now stands; and canonical representations of Ireland held in the National Gallery of Ireland. By placing these narratives into a shared investigative structure, 'The Irish Face' assembled a counter-taxonomy that revealed persistent institutional blind spots, omissions, and distortions in the preservation of cultural memory.