GRACE O’BOYLE REVIEWS MYRID CARTEN’S AWARD-WINNING  DEBUT FEATURE FILM, SET IN RURAL NORTH DONEGAL. 

Myrid Carten is an artist and filmmaker from the Gaeltacht region in Donegal. A graduate of Central Saint Martins and Goldsmith College in London, her practice utilises documentary and fiction to examine the struggle for intimacy and how the past continues to shape us. Carten’s debut feature film, A Want in Her (2024), is an immersive, first-person account of her relationship with her mother, Nuala, who is embroiled in the struggles of mental illness and addiction. 

Carten interweaves prophetic camcorder footage from her youth with 16mm shots of Northwest Donegal, intimate phone calls, and previous artistic projects, into an aesthetic tapestry that is strikingly original. The 81-minute documentary is not didactic, nor is it an inquiry into the source of her mother’s condition, but rather the artistic expression of a daughter navigating an impossibly thick world of responsibility, guilt, and unconditional love. 

After the death of the family’s matriarch 20 years prior, the family home becomes a contested site as Kevin, Nuala’s brother, solely inherits the house. Isolated and brooding in the Donegal terrain, the home is the first character we meet. It is an anthropomorphic entity – correlating with the interior lives of the family members who inhabit it. Carten does not present the home as a static object or set design; instead, she renders the domestic space alive through a surreal and haptic treatment of everyday materials. 

The camera follows water droplets fall from the ceiling; it shoots from ashes in the fireplace, and tunnels lace curtains. Its oneiric imagery takes on a ghostly quality, suggesting that an energy remains at large in the house. Within the home, the film’s central container, certain constants persist; boiling the kettle, smoking cigarettes, and gathering around the fireplace become grounding, life-sustaining rituals. 

With a camera in hand, Carten makes a clearing through thick foliage to access an abandoned caravan just outside the family home. Her other uncle, Danny, is sheltering, but the natural world has already crept in. It is now reclaimed – wild, rotting, and unruly. Danny’s presence makes familial conflict visible to the viewer, allowing Carten’s diaristic exploration to unfold. Fractured and non-linear, the film’s timeline relies on Carten’s intuition and technical skill to construct the contours of her and her mother’s complex dynamic. She resists straightforward explanation and embraces a form of filmmaking that thinks through trauma.

A woman wearing a grey hoodie is collapsed on a public bench in Belfast city. She clenches a bottle of wine, her legs crossed, as a pink double-decker bus passes with the words “You Can Get Through This,” pasted on an advertisement. It feels scripted in its cosmic irony. Carten identifies her mother who has been missing: “I knew straight away it was mammy because of the heels.” She films at a distance, preserving the quiet, implicit agreement to remain discreet whenever Nuala is drinking. In this moment, as with many throughout the film, the viewer is an participating subject, who must reckon with themes of consent, trust, and the necrotic forces at play within the human experience.

Although systemic issues are not directly addressed in the film, they inevitably linger. As a Donegal native, Carten’s depiction of Errigal, the Muckish Mountains and Gortahork evoke familiar feelings of desolation and disadvantage. They are mythic in their presentation, but those who live at the foot of Errigal understand the ominous ambiguity of this landscape. Carten’s debut is a profoundly vulnerable account of mental illness, addiction in rural Ireland, and the tension between survival and responsibility.  

Grace O’Boyle is a curator and writer from Donegal, based in Dublin. 

Myrid Carten’s film, A Want in Her, premiered at the International Documentary Film Festival 2024 (IDFA) and won several awards during its festival run, before winning three British Independent Film Awards (BIFAs) in November 2025.

myridcarten.com

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GUEST CURATOR DR SELINA GUINNESS OUTLINES PROGRAMME HIGHLIGHTS FOR DUBLIN ART BOOK FAIR IN DECEMBER.

Each year, Dublin Art Book Fair (DABF) is produced by Temple Bar Gallery + Studios and presents a wide range of unique artist books and titles from creative, small, and independent publishers alongside an events programme of talks, tours, workshops and book launches. As part of the wider DABF programme, a Guest Curator is invited to create their own programme of events and selection of titles under a chosen theme. 

As DABF 2025 Guest Curator, my theme ‘Flock’ examines all thing pastoral. This includes topics such as humans and beasts as herding creatures; the relational arts of shepherding; the impact of flocks on habitats, and how wary scapegoats, too, may flock together to combat predation. Two decades of farming sheep in the Dublin Mountains while teaching at IADT have focused my mind on the kinds of habitat required to sustain different flocks – when one ewe fails to thrive, the whole flock needs to move onto better pasture.

In September, my first event for DABF was a successful preview at Philip Maguire’s farm on Newtown Hill, Glencullen. This farm walk and herding demonstration introduced a small group to the farming community who work to make a living from grazing animals in full view of the city.  Returning to TBG+S, the remaining events I have curated for the DABF 2025 programme aim to provide a creative commons, where human flocks can meet, graze and find sustenance in mutual regard and a shared commitment to collective welfare.

DABF 2025 launches on Thursday 4 December in TBG+S main gallery with a Guest Curator’s Talk to discuss ten titles chosen to expand on this theme, with the opening reception to follow.

On Friday 5 December is Cowboys & Shepherds, Fieldwork & Studio, a curatorial panel discussion with acclaimed artists and farmers, Miriam O’Connor and Orla Barry, about what counts as work in art and agriculture, co-moderated with Adam Stead (SETU). When wool is worthless, and farming beef-cattle barely viable, how do we value pastoral lives? What does it mean to breed, feed and mind the sheep and cows we send to slaughter? We will focus on the work of raising flocks and explore the lives of shepherds and cowherds as disruptive pinch-points in late-stage capitalism, as they tend to people, place, produce and practice in the contested rural environment. 

On Friday 12 December, the second of my curatorial panel talks, Of Human Flocks & Other Species, sees acclaimed artist, Isabel Nolan, and two exceptional writers, Darran Anderson and Cathy Sweeney, discuss the complexities of their relations with particular flocks, human and non-human. How do other species instruct us in what counts as work and care? The conversation will explore the ambivalence of artists and writers as shepherds and sheep in negotiating real and creative habitats, drawing on Nolan’s dynamic practice, and two literary works sparked by a compulsive desire for perspective: Darran Anderson’s Derry memoir, Inventory (Farrar Straus & Giroux, 2020), and Cathy Sweeney’s debut novel, Breakdown (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2024). We will take a hard look at flock dynamics, and the new habitats formed by strays, scapegoats and outcasts, while questioning how artists fare when penned up individually. 

A highlight of DABF 2025 is a new Publisher’s Series made possible through a partnership with the Culture Office of the Creative Europe Desk (Ireland). For this, we are inviting acclaimed Palestinian author, Adania Shibli, and her Fitzcarraldo Editions publisher, Tamara Sampey-Jawad, to discuss her astonishing novel, Minor Detail (2017). A Palestinian woman sets out to locate the site of a war crime committed in 1948, only to find the familiar maps to be of no use in navigating disputed territories. Minor Detail vividly enacts the experience of military surveillance, violent dispossession, and land confiscation suffered under occupation. 

This special event on Saturday 6 December will reflect on the work of Fitzcarraldo Editions, a staple at the Dublin Art Book Fair, and the vital importance of literary translation in protecting our intellectual commons against aggressive polarisation. In addition to Minor Detail, and in keeping with the DABF theme ‘Flock’, our honoured guest, Adania Shibli, will present selected works by Palestinian artists who have continued to create, and counter subjection, while living under colonial and genocidal conditions. 

Full details of DABF 2025 (4 – 14 December), including the events I have curated and mentioned above, are available on the TBG+S website. DABF 2025 is proudly sponsored by Henry J Lyons and supported by Dublin UNESCO City of Literature. 

Dr Selina Guinness is Guest Curator of Dublin Art Book Fair 2025. She is also Head of Teaching and Learning at IADT, where she works to promote transdisciplinary pedagogies across IADT’s provision. 

iadt.ie/about/staff/dr-selina-guinness

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CLARE LYMER OUTLINES NIVAL’S RECENT ACQUISITION OF THE BELFAST INTERNATIONAL FESTIVAL OF PERFORMANCE ART ARCHIVE.

In a significant move for the preservation of Northern Ireland’s performance art history, the National Irish Visual Arts Library (NIVAL) has secured the archive of the Belfast International Festival of Performance Art (BIFPA). This acquisition safeguards invaluable insights into the country’s performance art heritage, offering future generations of artists, researchers, and the general public unprecedented access to a wealth of material documenting over a decade of boundary-pushing performances.

Founded by artist, lecturer and curator Brian Connolly, BIFPA was established as an independent annual festival within Ulster University in 2013. Dedicated to creating innovative performance works, it brought together international, national, and local artists, alongside emerging talent from Ulster University’s Belfast School of Art. BIFPA became a vital platform for experimental work, with performances that challenged traditional notions of visual arts and creative expression. Connolly’s vision, supported by other key figures such as Alastair MacLennan, Sandra Johnston, and the Bbeyond collective, significantly shaped Northern Ireland’s artistic landscape. Fostering collaboration and innovation, they created a support network that continues to thrive. The BIFPA archive stands as a testament to their efforts, preserving artists’ legacies while providing a comprehensive resource for future scholarship and creative exploration.

Performance art, by its ephemeral nature, poses unique challenges to preservation, resulting in a noticeable gap in Irish collections. The BIFPA archive, currently spanning from 2010 to 2024, counters this ephemerality with an extensive collection of digital-born materials. It comprises over 6,000 images and 400 videos of more than 200 performances. The archive documents the evolution of this dynamic art form, offering a rare resource that bridges past and present.

The archive’s significance is illuminated by the daring individual performances preserved within. One such instance is Christoff Gillen’s 2015 work, A Thousand and One Kisses, a performance that made headlines. Gillen chalked a ‘rainbow of love’ on pavements to highlight LGBTQ+ rights and marriage equality. The performance, however, was disrupted when a passerby became hostile, and a Belfast City Council warden issued Gillen a fine for graffiti. The artist’s solicitor argued that the act was a form of expression rather than vandalism. Ultimately, the council waived the fine, provided Gillen consulted them about future performances on public property. Highlighting tensions that can arise when performance art challenges societal norms and regulations, this and other BIFPA performances demonstrate the importance of boundary exploration to encourage dialogue.

Beyond its historical significance, the BIFPA archive is a living resource. Contemporary artists can draw inspiration from its rich documentation, and researchers can engage with primary source material to investigate the intersections of performance art with social and political movements. As the archive grows under NIVAL’s stewardship, it will undoubtedly have a lasting impact on the future of performance art in Ireland. It preserves the work of trailblazing artists, ensuring their legacies will continue to inspire and influence new generations of creators.

In 2024, to mark its 175th anniversary, the Belfast School of Art announced a partnership with the National College of Art and Design (NCAD). This new collaboration highlights the importance of fostering innovation and knowledge exchange across institutions in Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland. Together with NIVAL’s acquisition of the BIFPA archive, these initiatives underscore the value of cross-border cultural preservation and educational collaboration, enriching Ireland’s artistic and academic landscape.

NIVAL’s commitment to providing free access to its collections ensures that the BIFPA archive remains open for exploration, education, and research. Selected materials are accessible online through NIVAL’s digital catalogue, and the collection can be consulted in full at the NIVAL Reading Room.

Clare Lymer is Digital Collections Officer at NIVAL.

nival.ie

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CORNELIUS BROWNE TRACES THE TENDER INTERSECTIONS OF ART, NATURE, MUSIC, AND LOVE. 

“Bring music” were the first words I heard from my wife’s lips. A stranger, Paula appeared on my doorstep one night in 1987 with her best friend, who I knew vaguely, to invite me to a Halloween party. Smog cloaked the Dublin streets; the bitter air stank. I ran back upstairs and grabbed a handful of cassettes. 

The seeds that grew into my series of paintings, A Garden a Stone’s Throw from the Sea, had already been sown when curator Catherine Marshall contacted me. The invitation to show them as part of September’s Cashel Arts Festival, however, spread sunlight over their growth. As she recovers from cancer, Paula has been healing the overgrown fields amid which we live with sympathetic gardening. She works with the wild, her passion being pollinators. Insects are starved by neatness, our mania for gentrification and order hastening their decline. Paula has created a wildlife haven, a heaven of birdsong. It is a sanctum, also, to her painter husband. Melodies of colour flow from Paula’s begrimed fingers, timed to detonate months ahead, a leafy orchestration covering the year with fading beauty and fresh blossoms. 

Among my reasons for only painting outdoors lies a need to hear, as well as see, the landscape. Some of my paintings are not much larger than flower heads. I have always been drawn to the challenge of condensing as much feeling as I can into the smallest possible space. Catherine and I quickly realised that this made them ideal for Cashel. The unorthodox venue, in the Chapter House of the Church of Ireland Cathedral, offers none of the roomy blankness associated with contemporary art. Catherine’s photographs of bookcases and vitrines, which might be used in lieu of walls, caught under my sunhat like an old tune. 

One of my pleasures, listening to music, is tracing the journey of a single note in, let’s say, a Bach fugue. Painting her garden, my eyes often follow the journey of one of Paula’s pollinators. A bee buzzes past Anton Bruckner, born 200 years ago this year, on 4 September 1824. His short sacred choral works, the beautiful motets, have always struck me as small devotional gardens. An evening moth guides Nicola LeFanu through the trees. Her Sextet: Fasach – A Wild Garden, first performed at the Hugh Lane Gallery in 1997, and inspired by the composer’s favourite wild places along the western coastline of Ireland, frequently lends texture to my paintings. A butterfly rests upon the shoulder of Claude Debussy, near the willow from which Paula has suspended a watering can. My painting hopes to borrow notes from the opening flute solo of Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune (1892-94), where Debussy set to music the poem by Mallarmé, the flute “watering the grove with melodies.”

In late May, on the edge of her garden, mid-conversation, Paula collapsed. She had suffered a ruptured brain aneurysm, a subarachnoid haemorrhage. “I’m dying,” she gasped into the grass pressing her lips. The next day I was in Dublin with our two children, as their mother underwent surgery. Dusk falling on the Grand Canal, I decided to show Cornelia and Lucian the window of the basement flat where Paula and I had lived for a decade. Peering from the pavement, after our sleepless night and long journey, we barely registered the door opening, or the man asking if he could help us. My garbled explanation led to an invitation inside to meet the man’s wife and revisit the past. 

Our shabby home was unrecognisable under layers of gentrification. Only the concrete backyard, now bare, retained Paula’s presence. This tiny space she had crammed with so many plants in terracotta pots that it took an entire lorry to move them to Donegal. Across 20 winters the terracotta crumbled, freeing captives to spread luxuriously. Painting Paula’s garden, I am among the leaves and blooms of our shared youth. Into my life she has brought such music. 

Cornelius Browne is an artist based in County Donegal. 

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SEÁN KISSANE DISCUSSES AN EXHIBITION AT IMMA THAT CELEBRATES THE LEGACY OF AN IRISH MODERNIST SCULPTOR.

Currently showing at IMMA, ‘Hilary Heron: A Retrospective’ celebrates the pioneering work of Dublin-born modernist sculptor, Hilary Heron (1923 – 1977). This is the first major exhibition of Heron’s work since 1964 and it brings together artworks from national and international collections. Part of the IMMA Modern Masters series, this retrospective seeks to correct the critical neglect of Heron’s work in the decades following her death. 

It had been the intention of Riann Coulter and I to curate a retrospective of Heron more than ten years ago. However, her work had been so dispersed, and so little research had been done, that it seemed like an impossible task. This project became possible through the work undertaken by Billy Shortall, first with his master’s thesis, and secondly through research commissioned by IMMA to trace Heron’s extant works, draw together primary and secondary sources, and document the trajectory of her biography and artistic career. 

The exhibition at IMMA is set out over several rooms, each articulating a different theme: Biography, Early Work, Venice Biennale, Flight, Primitivism, the Male Body, and the Female Body.¹ The displays articulate the full breadth of Heron’s sculptural practice, including wood carving, stone carving, welding in different metals, lead reliefs, beaten metal reliefs, and encased stone assemblages, as well as her graphic practices of drawing and etching.² 

Heron was never beholden to a single style or material, but she continually innovated and stretched the possibilities of her sculptural medium. Heron won many awards, including the Taylor Scholarship three years running. She was included in the Irish Exhibition of Living Art, found commercial representation with the Waddington Galleries, and was lauded in the press as Ireland’s foremost modern sculptor. Heron co-represented Ireland at the 1956 Venice Biennale alongside painter Louis le Brocquy (1916 – 2012). For this retrospective, we present a partial restaging of Heron’s Venice Biennale participation.³ 

In her essay for the accompanying monograph, Riann Coulter reads Heron’s work through a feminist lens, finding in these sculptures a common thread of female unruliness and defiance. Coulter contrasts Heron’s portrayal in the media as a beautiful, elegant, feminine woman with another reality conveyed in her archive – that of a woman who worked with her hands at the hard labour of carving and welding, who used the money from a modelling contract to buy a motorbike and travel across Europe on her own, and who always struck out on an independent path. 

The exhibition concludes with reflections on a woman who pursued an artistic medium traditionally associated with men and masculinity. Although she carved out a successful career in her lifetime, problems of historiography and how the art market values the work of women less than that of men, meant that her work largely fell into obscurity until now. 

The Lower Ground Galleries contain ‘Redux: Contemporary Irish sculptors at Venice’, curated by Sara Damaris Muthi, featuring the work of Siobhán Hapaska, Eva Rothschild, and Niamh O’Malley – female sculptors who represented Ireland at the Venice Biennale in 2001, 2019, and 2022 respectively. ‘Redux’, meaning revival, signals Heron’s enduring legacy in proximity to contemporary sculptural practice.  

Seán Kissane is Curator of Exhibitions at IMMA. ‘Hilary Heron: A Retrospective’ continues at IMMA until 28 October 2024, and will be presented at F.E. McWilliam Gallery and Studio from 15 November 2024 to 15 February 2025.  

imma.ie

¹ At F.E. McWilliam Gallery, the architecture will necessitate a different layout, but the key thematics will be retained in the display.  

² The checklist of works at IMMA and F.E. McWilliam is different, with a slightly smaller number of works travelling to Banbridge. Sketchbooks, journals, and smaller objects, such as jewellery and other domestic items, form part of the biographical display. 

³ We are grateful to Pierre le Brocquy who provided the Venice installation views from the le Brocquy archive, which facilitated the identification of works shown by Heron.

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The inspiration for my artwork, The Eviction (2021), came to me in the boxroom of my mother’s house in rural Wexford. I had recently returned from living in Clonmel for a spell, after leaving college. The optimism I had felt, on nights out with mates and during carefree student life, had totally diminished. 

Growing up, I had imagined life as an ascending stair toward a house and a nuclear family. When I entered my mid-twenties, however, I saw how that was a luxury now completely out of reach for me and most of my peers. I wouldn’t get the opportunities my parents had; I wouldn’t be able to offer my kids any security – if I could even afford to have kids at all. Instead, my life would likely be entirely lived subordinate to landlords, outside of Ireland altogether or, God forbid, in the box room, thereby forgoing relationships, babies, and the trappings of adulthood to be financially stable. 

Having been forced to leave the house I grew up in during my early teens – due to family circumstances rather than eviction – I had already attached monumental importance to the sanctity of a space that is truly one’s own. Though I wasn’t thrown out by bailiffs, the reality of seeing your possessions go into a skip, living in hotels, and watching family members struggle to keep the head through it all, still made a deep impression on me. Being a young enough man, I realised I still had relative mobility, even if security was out of the question. Unfortunately, some of my friends were not in the same position. When young children or family members in need of care become part of the equation, the lack of protection quickly becomes an existential threat. 

And this existential threat becomes a hard reality for some; bailiffs do knock on people’s doors and the Gardaí have been documented standing by while people are thrown out onto the kerb. I drew on these truths and made what I believe to be an honest and obvious parallel to the reviled landlordism of the 1900s. The Eviction is a scene depicting the sharpest, coldest end of the state’s failed housing policy, but the inspiration came from a desire to depict the utter travesty that Ireland has foisted upon its poor, its vulnerable, and its young. According to housing expert Rory Hearne 11,868 notices to quit were issued in Ireland last year. Between 1849 and 1854, there were 48,740 evictions, averaging 8,123 per year. At the current rate, modern Ireland is actually surpassing the rate of evictions during the famine era.

The process of making the piece itself was rather simple. I digitally super-imposed figures over a depopulated image of Daniel MacDonald’s painting, Eviction Scene (c.1850). I grabbed the Gardaí from media images of the Strokestown eviction and the North Frederick Street eviction, both events in 2018 that saw the establishment putting the interests of property, banks, and private landlords before people. There have since been calls for greater transparency on how An Garda Síochána police evictions, and their relationship with private security operators. Without rental protection, tenants in Ireland are simply a resource; become unprofitable or inconvenient and your landlord, with state backing, can throw you out. 

For the most part, the recent reaction to the piece was a flurry of the exact same emotions I felt when creating it – a desire for change and a sense of betrayal by a country whose leaders only seem to offer condescending platitudes rather than workable solutions. The Eviction has received all the vitriol, condemnation, and faux outrage that one might expect from a money-hungry monster, finally catching a glimpse of itself in the mirror. 

Adam Doyle’s prints of The Eviction are currently available for purchase, with 100% of profits being donated to a homeless charity.

spicebagmerch.bigcartel.com  

@spicebag.exe

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The etymology of bereavement is to “deprive or rob of.” At root, it is something enacted upon us. So too is bereavement’s progeny, grief, arriving not just for the person who is gone but also for ourselves. After my husband Colin died from cancer at 40, I entered a period of grieving, both for him and my lost self.

In my time and culture, without the black parramatta silk or bombazine dress of the Victorians, or Jewish observation timelines, I found I lacked a defined process of mourning. So, I went back to work a week after the funeral and carried on until, after further unexpected and traumatic deaths close to me, I was no longer road worthy. I left my job and returned to my practice. Within death, a part of me was reborn. 

This return to making was markedly different from my previous practice. Then, my gaze turned outwards to contemporary society; now, I looked inwards to my own experience. Through my work, I bore witness to my grief in what had become a chaotic, uncontrollable world. Living as material, I began working from a place of transparent vulnerability.  

What emerged was a lyrical conceptualism blurring art and life, externalising emotion, responding to relationships and the situation I found myself in, and forming presence that manifested absence. This is a lived archaeology of loss involving people, objects, place and story. Physically, it formalised across photography, text, object, video, sound, and documentation of performative action, such as Sending messages to the sea (2021-22), inspired by lighthouse keepers’ wives, signalling to their husbands from the shore, where I used semaphore flags, the language of the sea, to communicate: “I am here my love, where are you?” to the vast expanse of ocean and sky.  

Making acted as a tether to the departed – a way to hold them close – so much so, that I found it difficult to finish pieces. Only when the Linenhall Arts Centre invited me to show with them in January did I finalise the body of work and realise that this was not a letting go. My solo exhibition, ‘How to create a fallstreak’, continues in the gallery until 4 March. The fallstreak of the title is a meteorological term for holes that can appear in cloud formations, referencing the proverbial gap in the clouds I was attempting to create.

While writing the exhibition wall panels, I found myself repeatedly returning to re-work these ‘tombstones’. While demonstratively focused on my own experience, I was also attempting to expand autobiography, to go beyond personal memoir and speak to others about shared human experience. I wanted to create honest, open narratives beside my pieces to enable conversation rather than hide behind distancing art-speak. 

My practice has become a memorial, a transitional object, a communication and a salve. As I embodied loss, so did my work. To fill a void of absence, to find a way back to myself, to heal and come to a new understanding of my loss, I made art. This allowed me to access a space of mourning and, with it, a restoration of self.

Neva Elliott is a contemporary artist based in Dublin. After ten years as CEO of Crash Ensemble, Elliott returned to her art practice in 2021. Last year she was made an Irish Hospice Foundation signature artist. 

nevaelliott.com

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‘Practical Magic’ is the 12th iteration of Pallas Project/Studios’ annual exhibition, ‘Periodical Review’. Each year, Pallas directors, Gavin Murphy and Mark Cullen, invite two peers to consider the artworks, practices, exhibitions, projects, events, artistic and community initiatives, collaborations, publications and performances encountered in the previous 12 months. The four selectors then nominate the works that stood out for them during the year, and these are whittled down via an editorial process to five selections each, giving a total of 20 artworks. This process of four selectors with subjective viewpoints and positions, choosing work independently of each other, can lead to a show with a feeling of the ‘exquisite corpse’ about it. This format has its challenges but also allows for instinctive and surprisingly rich narrative connections to develop between the work, without the pressure of having to conform to a strict overarching curatorial theme. ‘Periodical Review’ is loosely designed to suggest a magazine-like layout, and in this sense, the spaces between works and the edits are clear. 

After an intense period of inaction and online interaction, 2022 saw an overdue abundance of exhibitions and events happening throughout the country. So, when Basic Space were asked to co-select this year’s ‘Periodical Review’, we approached this artistic bounty with a renewed intensity. For a few years, our lives shrank right down to the essential and the local, and since then, an increase in artistic practices focusing on the internal have flourished. The domestic and the corporal weave their way through the show, from soft pastels to shiny entrails. The multitude of crises that are at the forefront of the current global condition are also tackled head on. A selection of photographs from the now destroyed city of Mariupol in Ukraine, from the group TU Platform, is a particularly harrowing point in the show. In separate pieces, Cold War-era radios broadcast an imagined, but very likely climate catastrophe, and a cocoon of old family photos and sounds draw the viewer in, with nostalgia being felt, both physically and spectrally throughout the gallery. 

Striking palettes, aesthetics and ideas that lean towards the gothic enliven the space and lend a sense of unease: a punk Sheela na Gig and a silver tipped bean chaointe (or keening woman) sit across from each other; leather clad hands perform an unboxing video with feelings of the burlesque and the absurd, as box after surprising box are unveiled on a loop. Time and space are traversed in multicolour, from explorations of the conditions of Indian textile workers, to the recounting of past personal traumas. The walls are postered with monthly newsletters from an active community brimming with self-organised movement, ensuring the show is not without hope or humour – the essential strands that unify us and which we will need in abundance to survive and organise in the years ahead.

The contributors and artworks for ‘Periodical Review 12’ are: Kevin Atherton, Cecilia Bullo, Myrid Carten, Ruth Clinton & Niamh Moriarty, Tom dePaor, The Ecliptic Newsletter, Eireann and I, Patrick Graham, Aoibheann Greenan, Kerry Guinan & Anthony O’Connor, Camilla Hanney, Léann Herlihy, Gillian Lawler, Michelle Malone, Thais Muniz, Ciarán Ó Dochartaigh, Venus Patel, Claire Prouvost, Christopher Steenson, and TU Platform.

The invited selector’s this year were Julia Moustacchi and myself as co-directors of Basic Space – an independent voluntary art organisation founded in 2010, which has programmed educational events, residencies, events and exhibitions, primarily working with emerging and early-career practitioners. The majority of projects are hosted or organised in collaboration with external institutions, where Basic Space acts as a critical force, challenging attitudes and policy and promoting a representative and inclusive framework.

Siobhán Mooney is an independent curator and co-director at Basic Space.

basicspace.ie

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In Winter 2020, I was invited by CEO and Artistic Director, Emma-Lucy O’Brien, to be Curator-in-Residence 2021 at VISUAL Carlow. I commissioned six artists – Ebun Sodipo, Jonah King, Kumbirai Makumbe, Maïa Nunes, Joey Holder, and Jennifer Mehigan – to produce new work. This culminated in the exhibition ‘Speech Sounds’ (9 June – 21 August) which was presented at VISUAL as part of Carlow Arts Festival (CAF). ‘Speech Sounds’ included work by the commissioned artists, work selected through VISUAL and CAF’s ARTWORKS open call, and work loaned from the Arts Council Collection. Curated with Visual Arts Curator Benjamin Stafford, ‘Speech Sounds’ featured 23 artworks – including sculpture, sound, painting, film, photography and installation – by Emanuel Almborg, Jenny Brady, Once We Were Islands, Paul Hallahan, Dita Hashi, Austin Hearne, Vishal Kumaraswamy, Bridget O’Gorman, Eoin O’Malley, Kinnari Saraiya, Matt Smith, Brian Teeling, Frank Wasser, Francis Whorrall-Campbell, Mary Duffy, Maïa Nunes, Jonah King and Sue Huang, Ebun Sodipo, Marielle MacLeman, Kumbirai Makumbe, Jennifer Mehigan and Eleanor Duffin. 

‘Speech Sounds’ is the title of a short story by American sci-fi writer Octavia Butler, which takes place in the aftermath of a global pandemic that has left most of the survivors without the ability to speak, read, or write. During the early days of the lockdown, I retreated, as many did, to sci-fi movies and novels. Reading these texts through a Crip lens – the critical reading of disability – it became clear that many of these narratives share concerns with the body, communication, and disability. Specifically looking at ‘Speech Sounds’, these stories reveal problematic views of the ways disabled people communicate. I wanted to hold space for artists interested in the body, language, the speculative, and communication. This included works exploring the languages of disability and access, love and loss, of living and imagined languages, the material of words, and dialogues with history. 

Shown in the Main Gallery, Jenny Brady’s 2019 film, Receiver, explores Deaf history through a heated phone call, a protest at a university for Deaf students, reflecting on the Milan Conference of 1880, which led to the banning of sign language in a school for the Deaf. Upstairs in the Digital Gallery, Emanuel Almborg’s film Talking Hands (2016) explores the history and ideas around the Zagorsk school for deaf-blind children near Moscow in the 1960s and 70s. Using archival 16mm film, the work features scenes of children caressing bronze monuments and using sign language for the blind in which hands converse. These works explore the languages, cultures, histories, and acts of resistance by Deaf people, in the struggle for language rights and liberation.

In Frank Wasser’s Work in Relapse (2021) the artist pairs a photograph taken by his hospital bed with a towel taken from the hospital embroidered with the words ‘Hospital Property’, attending the artist’s concern with institutional critique and power. In the 1989 photograph, Cutting the Ties that Bind (Heroes), Mary Duffy makes a “vibrant statement about my life and the lives of other disabled people, our commitments and our values”. In Non-Verbal 1, 2 & 3 by Bridget O’Gorman the power of written word over the body is excavated, mimicking anatomy posters; the scream is both prescription and symptom, giving voice to the intelligibility of the body in pain. In relation to race and gender, Dita Hashi’s moving-image work, SAMRAA (2021), pulls from the archive of Arabic popular music, to evoke the historical and social meanings of an Arabic term with racial and gendered designations. These works reveal the symbolic weight bodies hold, and how we might read and disrupt these meanings. 

The written word leaves a mark on the body in a temporary tattoo by Francis Whorrall-Campbell, featuring a quote on learning and failure from The Undercommons (Minor Compositions, 2013) by Fred Moten and Stefano Harney. Brian Teeling’s human scale prints feature phrases from J.G. Ballard’s dystopian novel, Concrete Island (London: Jonathan Cape, 1974), giving a fleshy immediacy to the written word. The ways we connect back to the past and to ancestors is evoked by Maïa Nunes, using interviews with their aunt, archival material, and music to uncover histories of slavery and migration in the Caribbean. Referencing ritual practices of the Shona people and speculative interstellar travel, Kumbirai Makumbe imagines the body in-between time and space, in the sculptural installation, Pre-Intertopia (2022).

The team at VISUAL worked with skill and grace to make this ambitious exhibition happen. VISUAL’s Production Manager Anthony Walsh, Benjamin Stafford and I designed a wooden structure, dividing the main gallery into four corners, creating a more intimate space. This was installed alongside 23 artworks by technicians Tadhg McSweeney, Jimmy Snobby, Saidhbhín Gibson, and Laura McAuliffe. Learning Curator, Clare Breen, curated a playful Learning Gallery where audiences could experiment with alternative ways to communicate. Interim CEO, Paula Phelan, held sensitive conversations with partners to ensure artists and audiences were supported in their experience of the exhibition. Finally, I am deeply grateful to have worked with Benjamin Stafford, who led on production, and who provided invaluable guidance and support throughout. 

Iarlaith Ni Fheorais (she/her) is a curator and writer based between Ireland and the UK. 

@iarlaith_nifheorais

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‘FAMILY LINES’ is a multi-platform project I have developed with the support of the Douglas Hyde Gallery and the Arts Council of Ireland. It takes the form of a solo exhibition of newly commissioned work; a public programme of workshops, developed in collaboration with Éireann and I (a community archive for Black migrants in Ireland); public screenings, featuring works by Martina Attille, Black Audio Film Collective, Larry Achiampong, Jennifer Martin, Holly Graham, Zinzi Minott, and Salma Ahmad Caller; and public billboards by Henrique Paris in collaboration with Cypher Billboard, London. ‘FAMILY LINES’ explores experiences of migration and survival within the family unit and focuses on Black and Mixed-Race life in Ireland across generations. 

I am the white passing child of a mixed marriage born into a very white space. Dublin in the late 1980s and early 1990s was a monoculture and I was the only one I knew with a Black dad and grandmother. I learned our story by heart – who we were and where we came from. I carried a photo. I taught people how to say our surname, Rekab. A section cut from a larger piece, a core sample, a brief inventory: Temne1, Sierra Leone, Magburka2, Syria, labneh3, granat stew4, trading cloth, Dublin, boarding school, elocution lessons, nuns, my dad playing guitar, my mum an artist. These were fragments of lives remembered and retold, woven together into a cohesive story in response to that interrogating inquiry:  “Where are you really from?”

Because of my light skin tone, people questioned if I was my father’s child. I told different parts of my family story to different people. This auto-redaction was an editorial-process-as-defence-mechanism; it made me up as a new person every time. It was a method of storytelling that came from knowing that not all of me was welcome in one space. 

The work I have made for ‘FAMILY LINES’ is part of a process of reclaiming this auto-redaction and auto-becoming as an experimental method of making art. Through this exhibition I want to transform the negation of having to re-tell who I am differently each time, within the dynamism and fluidity that come with being Mixed-Race and Irish. The films, sculptures and prints in the exhibition reference objects excavated from my personal past as well as shared cultural histories. They connect with this idea of making something new and coherent out of fragmented images from different points in time. Figures and objects phase in and out of visibility, are layered and brought together in ways that would not be possible outside the image. 

‘FAMILY LINES’ is about struggling to piece together who you are in the culture you grew up in. It is also about finding yourself through your family’s journey and trying to make a space for yourself in proximity to your ancestors. Each element of the program connects with and elaborates on these ideas in their own distinct and nuanced ways, weaving them together with personal and political concerns and presenting works that interrogate, nurture, love and remember who we are and where we come from.

Alice Rekab is an artist based in 

Dublin.

alicerekab.com

Notes

1 My grandmother is Temne – an indigenous Sierra Leonean People.

2 Magburka is a small town in rural Sierra Leone, where my grandmother was born.

3 A traditional Levantine dish of fermented milk curds served with garlic and olive oil.

4 A traditional Sierra Leonean stew made with peanuts.

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