Return to Disintegration—Periodical Review 11.
Selected by Sheena Barrett, Alice Butler, Mark Cullen, Gavin Murphy
Tanad Aaron & Mark Swords, Ella Bertilsson, Helen Blake, Bog Cottage Collective, Jenny Brady, Amanda Coogan, crux.project, Ailbhe Cunningham & Aoife Desmond, Joy Gerrard, Emma Wolf-Haugh, Barbara Knežević, Orla McHardy, Dennis McNulty, Jennie Moran/Home Bodies, Ciaran O'Keefe, Alice Rekab & Louise Meade, Sheila Rennick, Eimear Walshe, Frank Wasser, Fiona Whelan, Brokentalkers and Rialto Youth Project. Essay by Laurence Counihan
Preview
6–9pm, Friday 10th December 2021
Gallery hours
12–6pm, Thursday–Saturday
11th December 2021 – 22nd January 2022
5 August - 2 September 2021
Catalyst Arts, Belfast
“A suitcase lives undisturbed in a cardboard box, a human-sized pair of yellow scissors hang on the wall, to-do lists in chalk are suspended in time, a jar of pickled carrots sits on top of the CCTV screen and a bow, without a fiddle, is constantly being moved around the room.”
Concealed in the half-light disrupts the idea of the archive as a collection of ‘inanimate fossils’, where even in its entirety is only an illusion of history and presents just traces of reality. By looking at the Catalyst Arts archive and its unruly nature, there is potential to challenge the politics and power dynamics of the traditional archive which rigidly depends on data organisation such as standardisation and categorisation. These are systems put in place to streamline the varied and eradicate difference, which ultimately erases the value of difference. So when there are multiple histories and no agreed narratives, there is a possibility to offer archive alternatives, by acknowledging the subjective, intimate and personal, essentially the ‘unarchivable’.
This is an exhibition of many voices with invited artists Alice Rekab, artist-in-residence Nollaig Molloy, Matthew Wilson, the Department of Ultimology, the Digital Archive of Artists’ Publishing (DAAP) with Frances Whorrall-Campbell and the Artist-Led Archive.
GUEST
Experience Newbridge House's inaugural contemporary art installation 'GUEST' launching this June
Ella de Burca, Eithne Jordan, Barbara Knežević, Niamh McCann, Helen O'Leary, Niamh O'Malley, Liliane Puthod, Alice Rekab with Louise Meade, Katie Watchorn, Emma Wolf-Haugh
Newbridge House is delighted to announce the opening of a landmark new exhibition:Guest – at Newbridge House.
Fingal County Council’s Art Office in partnership with Newbridge House are delighted to launch this programme which sees contemporary art installed in one of Fingal’s best preserved heritage properties. An annual programme will see an invitedGuestcurator to install an exhibition of contemporary artworks throughout the house which takes inspiration from the important historic collection preserved at Newbridge. Juxtaposing old and new will draw parallels, pose questions, and animate the art collection in an exciting and sometimes challenging way.
We are thrilled to have as our inauguralGuestCurator: Marysia Wieckiewicz Carroll for summer 2021. Her exhibitionNew considerations of familiar settingsdraws its inspiration from the collecting and homemaking of Lady Betty Cobbe (1733-1806).
The exhibition brings together an exciting array of eleven women and gender-minority artists whose practices explore personal, historical, and cultural narratives through sculpture, painting, film and installation. The exhibition asks the question what would Lady Betty be collecting if she were alive today?
Isatu an Ee Cat (2021)
Acquired by the Irish Museum of Modern Art
May 2021.
Table
Snek/Mantelpiece (
2020
)
Acquired by The Arts Council | An Chomhairle Ealaíon
January 2021.
Collaboration with Uma Breakdown supported by Arcade Campfa.
Exploring dark fictions and animals with Uma Breakdown as part of the Peer Support Award from Arcade Campfa Cardiff. December 2020.
Migration Sings (2020).
Commission for Culture Night 2020 at Temple Bar Gallery+Studios. September 18-28th 2020
In this film Alice Rekab uses an old family photograph, animation and a song about migration to explore intergenerational experiences of loss and (non)belonging. The film's soundtrack is the result of an ongoing collaboration with Sierra Leonean musician Khalilu Gibrill Daneil Conteh and takes the form of a Temne lament. Temne is the shared indigenous language of both Conteh and the artist's paternal grandmother. This work has been commissioned by Temple Bar Gallery+Studios and will take the form of an archival deposit at Éireann and I : An archive of black life for Black migrants in Ireland. You can find out more about Éireann and I at eireannandiarchive.com/. You can find out more about Alice Rekab alicerekab.com/.
Truth, Flags, Identity
Temple Bar Gallery + Studios presents a new public artwork by Alice Rekab. September 18-28th 202
Alice Rekab takes their own mixed-race Irish identity as a starting point for a multiplatform visual intervention online and into Dublin’s landscape, activating conversations around race, place and belonging in the context of Irish life. Rekab re-appropriates two Dublin City Council flag poles along Wellington Quay adjacent to TBG+S and presents Migration Sings, a new audio-visual work online.
5 .gifs/for the meantime
@
Kleine Humboldt Galerie Berlin
KONTINUUM : something between Archive and Project Space
_Wiliče_ is a covid collaboration between Barbara Knezevic and Alice Rekab.
These digital drawings and .gifs are developed through a correspondence practice exploring our ancestors, fragments, and monuments. Through our work together we explore shared experiences of our respective migrant heritage and its impact on our perspectives as artists. Barbara Knezevic was born in Australia to post World War II immigrant Polish and Yugoslav families, and is now living and working in Ireland. Alice Rekab is of mixed Irish, Syrian and Sierra Leonean descent, the name Rekab is an Anglicisation of Al Rikabi (الركابي).
As unreliable narrators of multiple origins it is from this starting point that we propose a sequence of 5 x .gif moving images, designed to be programed between other works or shown in sequence as part of an interval. Fitting somewhere in between, these moving images, like the images presented in our portfolio, take their origins from imaginary topographies, partisan monuments, ancient fragments of domestic life and Irish, Syrian, Serbian, Croatian and West African folktales ( real or fabricated). _Wiliče_ is interested in the creative interpretation of provenance, tradition, and the other stories we tell ourselves about who we are, where we come from and where we are going.
https://www.somethingbetween.org/alice-rekab-barbara-knezevic