Rua Red
27 June – 13 September 2025
‘Together in Commune’, curated by Marysia Więckiewicz, is the first group exhibition from Rua Red’s Studio Programme, showing work by seven current residents, David Beattie, Ala Buisir, Cecilia Bullo, Pauline Cummins, Lauren Kelly, Maria McKinney, and Fiona Whelan.
The initial curatorial challenge – to bring together a diverse group of pre-selected artists – was approached not through thematic constraint, but by foregrounding core values of the Studio Programme: support and relationship building. While a socially engaged approach underpins much of the work, what emerges is an overarching ethos of care: between the artists and those they work with; between the institution and its residents; and among the artists themselves.
This spirit of care is attentively reflected in the exhibition structure. Recognising that the artists were on different residencies and project timelines, Więckiewicz did not ask the artists to produce new work for the show. Instead, she engaged in dialogue with each, exploring their processes to variously capture works in progress, touchpoints for practice, and experiments that had emerged through sharing space. As a result, the exhibition also reflects on what having a studio space means: as a place for making work, thinking, gathering, and holding one’s practice, but also through cohabitation, as the site of energetic exchanges across disciplines, life experiences, and career stages.
For Pauline Cummins, an established performance and video artist, her time at Rua Red represents her first regular studio in over 40 years. Speaking during the curator’s tour on 19 July, she reflected on the studio crisis, the loss and damage of archives, and how the ethics of care need to extend to the objects we create. Her recent works, Dictators Die and Empires Fall (both 2023), suspended high in the gallery, respond to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The mark-making behind the yellows and blues belies a deep anger, while the crumbling, plaster-infused paint on tracing paper speaks to geopolitical and personal vulnerability.
Nearby, works by Lauren Kelly and Ala Buisir extend this register. Buisir’s Part of the Fabric (2025) overlays family photographs onto the tricolour, tracing their history of migration and resistance. Her grandmother, a poet who “couldn’t be silenced”, is just one of the figures in her rich and personal inheritance, as explained by the artist during the curator’s tour. This piece is accompanied by other flag-based images, generated with participants in workshops led by the artist, which are part of a broader series of activities embedded within the exhibition’s duration. Buisir shares a studio with Lauren Kelly, allowing for conversations that revealed connections in their work and fostered practical support.
Kelly’s contribution in immediacy looks political but comes from the deeply personal, not forgetting the feminist slogan, “The personal is political”, in particular relating to experiences of gender. A stitched composite banner composed of the flags of Ireland, China, and Taiwan, is planted into the floor, from a performance in which she and her mother walked between a former Magdalene Laundry site and Chinese and Taiwanese diplomatic missions in Dublin. The work honours Kelly’s late father, of Chinese-Taiwanese descent. In front of it, soil remnants from Kelly’s opening night performance, Against the Oppressor (2025), spell out “REFUGEES ARE WELCOME,” in comment on identity and generational intolerance.
Maria McKinney’s Cattle and Capital (2019) documents a sculptural intervention at a Jersey cattle show, with McKinney leading a cow while adorned with a structure made of a milking yolk and semen straws used in artificial insemination. Her second work, Need Feed Greed (2023), is a malty-smelling, wall-based text piece that utilises cattle feed to evoke the agricultural-industrial complex. Its olfactory element shares the gallery space with the scent of lavender emanating from Rhizoming: Actions of Process by Cecilia Bullo. An installation of rope sprawls across the ceiling, rising from a base of hi-vis material and lavender, guiding the eye up to her frieze, Vestigial Ornaments: A Procession of Endangerment – Lament I (2025), which encircles the gallery in yellow, printed with garlands, cattle skulls, and animal remains.
David Beattie’s practice “explores the material world through experiential, physical engagements with objects and non-objects,” and is increasingly research and community-driven (david-beattie.net). It takes form here as an open structure: trestle tables, stools, books, and notes documenting his collaboration with Clondalkin Global Garden. The project, Along the Camac (2025), exists both off-site in Corkagh Park and within the gallery through a series of workshops as part of the exhibition’s public engagement programme.
A long-standing figure in socially engaged art, Fiona Whelan presents The River (2025), a large-scale map illustrating the methodologies of collaborative practice. Developed in collaboration with artists Dr Ciaran Smyth and Orla Whelan, and further refined through workshops with other practitioners, The River transposes phases of engagement onto an imagined body of water, with “Radical Listening” emerging as its largest pool.
‘Together in Commune’ offers insights into the depth of making and thinking currently happening under Rua Red’s roof. The exhibition also embodies the ethos of the artist’s studio as an active space for creation, dialogue, and care.
Neva Elliott is an artist and writer based in Dublin.
nevaelliott.com
