Reframing the Border curated by Gallery of Photography Ireland
for Remote Photo Festival

Disputed Territory Anthony Haughey

Remote Photo is a festival dedicated to photographers creating work in a remote or rural context. The theme for this year’s festival is ‘Reframing the Border’. The border in Ireland is one of the most important issues affecting the island of Ireland. As we approach the centenary of partition the possible imposition of a hard border has prompted intense speculation and debate. The ‘Reframing the Border’ exhibition at the Regional Cultural Centre presents work by established and emerging Irish-based photographers who explore the diverse physical, social, psychological and imagined spaces of the borderlands in Ireland at this critical point in time. Exhibition continues until 19 May 2018. Remote Photo Festival have invited leading artists, broadcasters  creatives, curators, entrepreneurs, historians, politicians and writers to come together for a series of discussions and events to explore issues affecting the borderlands: past, present and future.

Weekend of exhibitions, talks and events on 11th, 12th & 13th May in the Regional Cultural Centre, Letterkenny, Donegal.
For full programme details please click here

Forum is part of a cultural diversity research project commissioned by Rua Red and Civic Theatre. Its objective is to explore the cultural richness of migrant communities living throughout South Dublin County. Envisaged as a stepping stone towards a long-term process of connection, collaboration and engagement, Forum invites community leaders and arts sector providers to engage in a series of transcultural dialogues to learn from each other in mutual exchange. Forum aims to identify barriers to access and provision that may exist or inhibit ethnic groups from originating or participating in art and cultural activities in South Dublin County arts venues. Central to this event is an understanding of cultural diversity as a plurality of identities, described in the UNESCO Universal Declaration on cultural diversity as ‘an adaptive process [with] a capacity for expression, creation and innovation’.

Forum, Transcultural Dialogues programme

Artists

Samuel Laurence Cunnane, Stephanie Deady, Willie Doherty, Vanessa Donoso Lopez, Anthony Haughey, Dragana Jurisic, Ronan McCrea, Isabel Nolan, Mairead O’hEocha, Kathy Prendergast, Tamsin Snow & Sarah Tynan.

Inspired by a quote by Jacques Derrida, this exhibition curated by Linda Shevlin and Aoife Ruane seeks to present works that respond to themes of hospitality, identity, friendship and the multitude of journeys and conflicts encountered to attain them. In response to ongoing and globally transformational international events, Bealtaine, the national May-time festival celebrating creativity as we age has adopted the theme of hospitality, hosting and welcome as a broad and multi-layered festival theme. The deeper undertones to the principle of hospitality are underlined by historical interpretations of the concept, including Jacques Derrida’s philosophical work on the Ethics of Hospitality.

More information

Irish Times Review

Review newsprint

Crisis and the Visual Arts in Ireland

This paper explores contemporary responses to crisis in Ireland as refracted through visual arts practice. The key question that will be pursued is not the primarily philosophical one of “what is the nature of crisis?” but the situational one of “how might a sense of crisis manifest itself through the practice of a visual artist?” In attempting to answer this question it is hoped some light can be shed on other questions that appear to have gained greater urgency since the pivotal moment in 2008 when the economic ground shifted under the Irish people. Do artists have an obligation to engage with politics? Can some of the underpinning rationales for artist engagement, particularly in the field of relational aesthetics, empower artists to meet expectations that their work can, or should, be capable of decisive interventions at historical moments of crisis? A related objective is to ground a theoretical understanding of the nature of crisis in the evolution of an artist’s work, to gain some sense of its temporal manifestation in the life-long, everyday practice of making art.

The two artists I have engaged with to examine these questions, Deirdre O’Mahony and Anthony Haughey, were selected with a clear understanding that any number of other artists might just as equally have suited. The reason for the choice is that the author is familiar with the work of both over time and understands both, in variable ways, to be committed to exploring the interaction of political and aesthetic values in their practice.

Article available here

In a new series of articles, critic and broadcaster Cristín Leach selects 21 artworks for RTÉ Culture that define Modern Ireland.

Number Five: Anthony Haughey – Settlement (2011)

Anthony Haughey’s photographs of half-finished houses and abandoned residential building-sites have a near-supernatural, spiritual glow about them. Shot in low sun, as part of a series entitled Settlement in 2011, these images capture empty homes sitting like unconsummated promises at the end of overgrown tracks edged by mounds of earth and rubble, cleared aside but never levelled.  A flare of light hits a window or gable end, suggesting a kind of poignant beauty, but what is really on offer is a bleak reminder of the physical and emotional residue of the Celtic Tiger building boom and bust. Ghost estates continue to haunt the nation’s notion of home. Haughey’s Settlement photos are images of hope and loss, what was done and left undone.

Anthony Haughey’s photographs of half-finished houses and abandoned residential building-sites have a near-supernatural quality.

Collaborative Arts, Interculturalism and Human Rights seminar, April 6, 2017

This seminar set out to encourage discussion about the vital role the arts, and in particular collaborative arts, can play in promoting interculturalism and human rights. The contributors and speakers for Collaborative Arts, Interculturalism and Human Rights seminar included: Bisi Adigun, Katherine Atkinson, Clodagh Emoe, Warsame Ali Garare, Anthony Haughey, Sinisa Koncic, Laragh Pittman, Annet Mphahlele, Marie Claire Mundi Njong, Nor Nasib and Jijo Sebastian.

Keynote presentation, Anthony Haughey and Warsame Ali Garare. Watch here

“INHABITING THE BAGEION: architecture as critique” comes from a collective that emerged from a developing relationship between Irish and Athenian-based artists, architects, urban thinkers and urban activists. We come from multiple fields in the arts but all share an interest in exploring alternative models of teaching, practice, and processes within architecture through exhibition and workshops involving a wider public. The project offers a response to current socio-political issues through architecture – and at the same time – explores the practice of critique itself. This spatial critique argues for alternative modes of knowledge and knowing (embodied, sensory, instinctual, gestural and performative) to enter into the field of critical and sensory discourse, and help shape a more responsive understanding of interpreting experience within a new mode of architectural critique.

The exhibition presents architecture as being part of a social and cultural collective process through a series of curated spaces over four storeys of the defunct hotel: Firstspace present’s alternative models of teaching architectural practice as a mechanism of social inclusion and new forms of social engagement. Secondspace presents a series of visual art films by prominent Irish and International artists (Anthony Haughey; Mark Curran; Lina Selander; Harun Farocki; Megs Morley and Tom Flanagan) where architecture appears to carry the burden of historic events in the absence of any human accountability. Thirdspace presents an ongoing ethnographic research project by Eve Olney that focuses on the agency of the architect within a participatory architectural process. The work centres on the relationship between an Activist/Architecture group, Urban React and the original inhabitants of a 1930s refugee housing block in Athens as a means of exploring the cultural value of habitation. Fourthspace is an open creative space of workshops and events led by Irish artist Seamus Nolan collaborating with Irish, Greek and Swiss squatters/activists/ artists/ architects/ musicians that explores Squatting/Occupation as a means of cultural and social production. During the two-week exhibition Nolan and his team will design and produce items of furniture from ‘Lists’ of requested items from occupations and squats around Athens and attempt to initiate ongoing programmes.

This exhibition is in collaboration with the Athens Biennale.

Exhibition Duration: 14th – 26th October, 2017 | 12:00 – 20:00
Fourthspace Workshops: 15th – 24th October, 2017 | 12:00 – 18:00
Venue: Bageion Hotel | 18 Omonoia Square, Athens

For more information please visit exhibition’s facebook page here.

Post Picturesque: Photographing Ireland, Rochester Arts Centre, Minnesota 29 June – 10 September 2017

Ireland beckons tourists with its near-mythic rural beauty, even in post-Celtic Tiger, previous economically robust times. To many outside the island, Ireland’s identity continues to be entrenched in the romantic vision of idyllic, rustic people and places. Tourists are fed photos of bucolic green fields, stone walls, ruins, grazing beasts and cottages that perpetuate practices of the picturesque, which pushes the real, contemporary experience of Irish life out of view. Defying the inherent natural beauty of Ireland, Irish photographers embrace the challenge of representing a new, emboldened Irish identity through quizzical, charming, daring and truthful photography.

This exhibition presents exciting new work by cutting-edge Irish artists, created with critical intelligence, a keen sense of history, compositional vigor, and lively humor still deeply embedded in place.  Each artist grapples with the challenge of visually defining a landscape that retains many features of Ireland’s agrarian past, even its sectarian conflict, as well as more modern concerns of turbulent economic forces, farming methods, European Union regulations, real estate development, and lifestyle choices which effect Ireland’s rural experience and urban challenges.

Playing between the lines of picturesque and practical, Jill Quigley’s Rural Fluorescent series actively engages the abandoned, overlooked and unexciting, caught in the drama of the unexpected. Questioning the notions of beauty associated with representing landscape, Miriam O’Connor intercedes through whimsical display of the domestic, while David Farrell disrupts through digging into the dark history contained in the land. Paul Gaffney descends deep into the dark forest, entry to a hidden current of a Gothic underworld, mysterious and myopic, both beautiful and dangerous. Similarly, plunged into Paul Coyle’s painterly Lovely Water series, the viewer bounces on the waves, there in the same spot, Dublin’s famous Forty Foot cove, witness to change in light and form.  Anthony Haughey and Martin Cregg explore the sublime and beautiful potential of abandoned relics of Celtic Tiger overdevelopment. Two more photographers consider the living and working potential of everday alternatives created by women running farms in Anna Rackard’s Farmers and by new age, utopian seeking commune in the West of Ireland in Ruby Wallis’ Unfixed Landscape. The Irish picturesque, under the postcolonial critique, is associated with domination and control by outsiders. By  contrast, this exhibition celebrates Irish artists’ experience of their own land and their inventive approaches to picturing place.

On the tenth year anniversary of the photographies journal, the editors, David Bate and Liz Wells, take part in an in-conversation on the contribution of the journal to critical debates and international issues for contemporary photography today. With special guest speakers, including Louise Wolthers (Hasselblad Foundation, Sweden) and Anthony Haughey (photographer and tutor at Dublin Institute of Technology, Ireland).

The event is supported by Routlege, Plymouth University and University of Westminster.
The ten year anniversary conference takes place in London on Thursday 18 May & Friday 19 May 2017.

The Politics of Images – FIF_BH 2017 – International Festival of Photography of BH

UNresolved video installation

Anthony Haughey Artist talk video during the festival 

The importance of understanding the role of images in political constructions is directly related to the possibility of criticizing and re-creating them. The emergence of more balanced symbolic systems depends on political and power relations, both ethical and plural. The Moving Images Program intents to reflect about the many creative possibilities presented by artists working with the nonstatic state of the image, in the intersection between photography, video, animation, animated GIF, cinema and new technologies. 
These works will be shown at the FIF-BH Main Exhibition 2017.

Post-Picturesque: Photographing Ireland presents nine accomplished artists, resident in the Republic and Northern Ireland, who respond to the famously picturesque Irish rural landscape with new aesthetic and critical approaches. This ambitious exhibition, curated by Perlman Teaching Museum Director Laurel Bradley, introduces the following lens-based practitioners to American audiences — many for the first time: Gary Coyle, Martin Cregg, David Farrell, Paul Gaffney, Anthony Haughey, Miriam O’Connor, Jill Quigley, Anna Rackard and Ruby Wallis.

Anthony Haughey, photographer: “Ireland in Crisis”

Anthony Haughey, one of the nine featured artists in the Perlman Teaching Museum exhibition Post-Picturesque: Photographing Ireland, will launch the exhibition with Ireland in Crisis: Post Celtic Tiger Photography, on Friday March 3, 7 pm Weitz 236 with opening reception in the museum to follow.  Haughey is a distinguished photographer and teacher (at Dublin Institute of Technology) whose photographic and film work focuses on issues of identity, tensions around borderlands, and contemporary social, political pressures related to changing geography. This talk will illuminate his Settlements project, which explores the new “ruins” left behind after the collapse of the real estate market and the “Celtic Tiger” economic boom of the late 1990s and early 2000s.

Anthony Haughey brings an artist’s eye to the task of representing empty housing estates, which he says had become a “visual cliché of post Celtic Tiger Ireland.” By contrast with banal news images of “ghost estates,” Haughey’s ruins, produced between dusk and dawn, are rendered with rhetorical grandeur: “The combination of darkness, long exposures, and artificial light draws attention to the destruction of the natural environment, a direct result of overdevelopment. Stalled building activity stands frozen in time, a reminder of disastrous laissez-faire capitalism and planning legislation.”

Just as the compositions—glowing spectacles of forlorn residential clusters and jagged unfinished walls—are theatrical, Haughey’s accounts of prowling the terrain are full of drama and strange pleasure: “Climbing over these temporary walls and walking into the darkness instills fear and awe, a sublime terra infirma.” Ultimately, the photographer defines these abandoned sites as places of collective mourning. These landscapes are not simply “a recording of what is in front of the camera lens, [they are] a reframing of collective memory/history to encourage a critical dialogue with the spectator, where memory is inextricably bound with these violated landscapes, a constant and painful reminder of economic failure and future indebtedness.”

The dystopian sublime of Settlement could paralyze an audience with shock and awe. Haughey, though, suggests ways forward via a creative collaboration with architects and architecture students. Drawn proposals for repurposing such urban eyesores as the abandoned Anglo Irish Bank headquarters site in the Dublin Docklands are a call to action and community spirit: “It is our collective responsibility to reimagine how the ruins of the present offer a unique opportunity to reimagine how we want to live in the future.”

Periodical Review 20/16

25/11/16—21/01/17
20 years of Irish contemporary art: Four perspectives
Selected by Brian Duggan, Sarah Glennie, Jenny Haughton & Declan Long

Aquinas, Callan Workhouse Union, Nina Canell & Robin Watkins, Dorothy Cross, Willie Doherty, Douglas Hyde Gallery, Fergus Feehily, Four Gallery, Anthony Haughey, Patrick Jolley & Reynold Reynolds, Des Kenny, Aileen Lambert, Clare Langan, Metropolitan Complex, Michael McLoughlin, Isabel Nolan, Seamus Nolan, Emer O’Boyle, Margaret O’Brien, Deirdre O’Mahony

An artwork, like a book, is not made up of individual words on a page each of which with a meaning, but is instead “caught up in a system of references to other books, other texts, other sentences” †

Periodical Review is an annual survey of recent Irish art, selected in collaboration with invited curators from around Ireland. Not a group exhibition per se, Periodical Review is a discursive action, with the gallery as a magazine-like layout of images that speak (the field talking to itself). Each year, Pallas Projects invite a number of peers – artists, writers, educators, curators – to review and nominate a number of art practices, selected via an editorial meeting. Such a review-type exhibition within Irish art practice acts to revisit, to be a reminder, a critical appraisal and consolidation of ideas and knowledge; to facilitate and encourage collaboration, crossover and debate.

Periodical Review 20/16  – which coincides with 20 years of Pallas Projects – sees four invited selectors survey key events, exhibitions, moments and artworks from the past 20 years to the present. The chosen practices emphasise the recent developments in contemporary art in Ireland, a period of new engagement with international practices, an increase in visiting artists, curators and speakers, with Irish curators and educators taking up major positions overseas, and Irish artists being showcased around the world. The works display and demonstrate a new confidence and energy that emerged in the visual arts during the 1990s and 2000s, by individuals and institutions. A period that included the international conferences such as Cork Caucus, 2005; the emergence of redesigned spaces such as Project, Temple Bar Gallery & Studios, and The Model; international art fair profile for Irish artists through galleries such as Kerlin and mother’s tankstation; new major regional galleries such as The Glucksman and VISUAL; critical publications such as Third Text’s ‘Ireland Issue’ edited by Lucy Cotter, or Paul O’Neill’s ‘Curating Subjects’; and acclaimed Irish pavilions at the Venice Biennale.

In looking at self-organised exhibitions, off-site projects, commercial gallery and museum shows over this 20-year period, Periodical Review 20/16 aims to share a spectrum of practices, creating dialogue and critical reflection to help develop and support Irish contemporary art as a whole; and to act as an accessible survey of contemporary art for a wider audience, showing an expanded experience of art practices from around the country.

† Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge

The Museum of August Destiny, Pearse Museum

4 November 2016 – 8 January 2017

Aideen Barry, Amanda Coogan, Mark Clare, Anthony Haughey, Dragana Jurisic and Sarch Pierce
A commissioned exhibition curated by Dr. Emily Mark-FitzGerald (University College Dublin). Adopting the form of the idiosyncratic “personal” museum, six artists have been asked to respond to visionary ideals set out in the 1916 Proclamation, presenting individual meditations on the State and society’s realization of (or retreat from) the “august destiny” envisioned by the Rising’s leaders.

The Museum of August Destiny, Pearse Museum

The Museum of August Destiny, Lismore Castle Arts: St Carthage Hall

UNresolved will screen in Buenos Aries, part of Bienal De La Imagen En Movimiento

More information here

A new lens-based and moving-image works by leading figures in Irish visual art, dance, and performance, engaging with the Centenary of the 1916 Rising. Followed by a Q&A session with featured artists Anthony Haughey and Andrew Duggan. Further information: National Gallery of Ireland

Manifesto screening in Centre Culturel Irlandais, part of the Paris wide 24 hour art festival Nuit Blanche (from 7pm – 7am)

Manifesto

HD Video with sound, 18 mins 30 sec

Anthony Haughey 2016

“We need to go back and recover the promise of a real republic that would be built on citizenship and that would reject as outrageous in a republic the kind of radical individualism epitomised in that ugly statement of Michael McDowell’s that inequality is needed for the stability of society”.

– Michael D Higgins’, final Dáil speech, delivered on 25 January 2011, before his inauguration as President of Ireland.

Ireland’s 1916 Proclamation was written by a group of ideologically conflicted leaders of the Easter Rising, the most critical event in the shaping of Ireland’s modern history.  From this source sprang a War of Independence that culminated in the setting up of a twenty-six-county Free State and a six-county Northern Ireland within the Union. The political sovereignty hard-won over these years was enshrined in the declaration of a Republic in 1949. But that sovereignty was seen to be compromised following the economic crisis of 2008 when a troika of managers from the EU and IMF arrived in the Republic to oversee a financial bailout for the country. The centenary of the Rising occurs only three years after the troika’s departure in 2013, raising many difficult questions about how the country measures up to the dreams and aspirations in the 1916 Proclamation of Independence. The Proclamation was controversially a call to arms, with the promise of an egalitarian Republic that was never fully realised. A century later Ireland is the most globalised economy in the world. Manifesto raises important questions for so many people living in Ireland today forced to live in ‘a permanent state of crisis’ while multinational corporations maintain huge profits.

Four writers – Pearse, Connolly, Plunkett and McDonagh – were central to the Rising. This ensured that art and culture were at the heart of the vision projected for an independent Ireland. Manifesto invokes historical and contemporary literature to reflect that fact that the Easter Rising was also an important cultural revolution and marked the emergence of Modernism.

UNresolved screening in Berlin

RuinNation The ruin in Irish art and visual culture 1916–2016

A symposium presented by TRIARC, Trinity’s Irish Art Research Centre
2nd April 2016; 10.00 am – 5.15 pm (Registration from 9.30 am)
Emmet Theatre (Room 2037), Arts Building, Trinity College Dublin.
ALL WELCOME.

Register Now

Keynote: Luke Gibbons
Contributors: Justin Carville : Terence Dooley : John Gerrard : Anthony Haughey : Sean Hillen : Fionola O’Kane Crimmins : Ellen Rowley : Yvonne Scott
Chairs:  Declan Long : Niamh NicGhabhann

UNresolved reflects on the twenanniversary of genocide in Srebrenica, where in 1995 more than 8000 men and boys were systematically murdered by The Bosnian Serb Army of Republika Srpska (VRS) under the command of General Ratko Mladic. The screening is followed by a conversation with journalist and writer Ed Vulliamy.

Beyond the Pale: The art of Revolution
DATE: EXHIBITION & FESTIVAL OPENING MONDAY 25 APRIL.
VENUE: HIGHLANES GALLERY, LAURENCE ST.
Highlanes Gallery is delighted to present ‘Beyond the Pale: The art of Revolution’, curated by artist Anthony Haughey

Independent.ie

The Museum of August Destiny
July 15 –September 4
Aideen Barry, Amanda Cooga, Mark Clare, Anthony Haughey, Dragana Jurisic and Sarch Pierce
A commissioned exhibition curated by Dr. Emily Mark-FitzGerald (University College Dublin). Adopting the form of the idiosyncratic “personal” museum, six artists have been asked to respond to visionary ideals set out in the 1916 Proclamation, presenting individual meditations on the State and society’s realization of (or retreat from) the “august destiny” envisioned by the Rising’s leaders.

Manifesto, a new film by Anthony Haughey, will be screened in the Irish Arts Centre, New York from 18 April until 1 May 2016.

Independent.ie

Irish Arts Review feature on my exhibition and new film, ‘UNresolved’ by Dr Stephanie McBride PDF download here

Disputed Territory will form part of a forthcoming Camera Austria exhibition in Kunsthalle Graz

Download Camera Austria pdf

‘Uncovering History’ exhibition Reviews pdf

‘Uncovering History’ Documentation of the exhibition in Kunsthaus Graz pdf

Irish Examiner review 10.3.15

EXCAVATION BY ANTHONY HAUGHEY

CURATED BY HELEN CAREY

23^rd January – 13^th March 2015

Anthony Haughey is an artist who explores contested territories in Ireland and Europe. In a premier for Limerick City Gallery of Art, Haughey returned to Bosnia to make a new film. UNresolved reflects on the twentieth anniversary of genocide in Srebrenica. Haughey presents a haunting memorial to the victims of the Bosnian war of 1992-95. The title relates to the UN Security Resolution 819, passed on the 16th April 1993 declaring Srebrenica as a ‘safe’ area for Muslim refugees – the prelude to what was the largest act of genocide in Europe since the holocaust. Following Haughey’s earlier work in Bosnia, between 1998-2002, he gained exclusive access to buildings and atrocity sites in Serb controlled territory, areas that have hitherto been off limits. Breaking the silence of this film is a recording of eyewitness accounts of massacre victims collated from archives such as Human Rights Watch and also directly from people encountered on research visits to Bosnia, with accounts of resistance and survival, testimonies from young Dutch soldiers who were serving in Srebrenica and conflicting accounts from UN personnel and Serb military commanders. The film explores ideological and political narratives informing this emerging and contested history. As Walter Benjamin stated, ‘articulating the past historically does not mean recognizing it ‘the way it really was.’ It means appropriating a memory as it flashes up in a moment of danger’ (1990).

Irish Arts Review pdf 

Limerick City Gallery exhibitions

Soundings – Collective memories of the sea
13 December – 24 January
dlr LexIcon Gallery, Dun Laoghaire, Co. Dublin

dlr LexIcon this weekend celebrates the opening of its inaugural exhibition, Soundings, in its state of the art, brand new municipal gallery.

Soundings is curated by artist Michael McLoughlin with thanks to Dún Laoghaire RNLI lifeboat crewmembers. It features the work of six artists – Gary Coyle, Anthony Haughey, Emma Johnston, Sabina MacMahon, Julie Merriman and Lisa Reburn.

Introducing the exhibition, curator Michael McLoughlin said, “Soundings explores the relationships between Dún Laoghaire, the sea and its people through artworks, talks and workshops. It brings together six artists with connections to Dún Laoghaire who have investigated maritime histories, memories, testimonies and archives. Soundings talks, workshops and performances will offer further opportunities to explore and engage with the local maritime themes. Throughout this exhibition there are themes that ebb and flow between the work of the six artists — the connections between the local, the town and the port.”

Soundings events will feature a performance of Gary Coyle’s At Sea, a spoken word performance based on the artist’s daily swimming diaries and photographs (15 Jan), a special screening of A Tribute to Sound, a short film by Simone Corr which commemorates the decommissioning of the foghorn from our coastline (21 Jan) and Prospect, a video piece by artist Anthony Haughey exploring migrant journeys from sub-Saharan Africa to Europe (24 Jan).

To explore and celebrate Dún Laoghaire RNLI, the crewmembers have created a video piece and a series of photographs, these can be viewed in the project room of dlr LexIcon. There has been a lifeboat present in Dún Laoghaire since 1803 with the RNLI establishing a station in 1861. Today the RNLI operate two lifeboats in the harbour and in 2013 alone rescued 67 people.

Opening day events on Saturday 13 December include a curatorial tour by Michael McLoughlin and crewmembers from the RNLI, a TOG workshop where participants will learn how to create and experience a Skull Radio, and families are invited to join in on the fun and help create a maritime frieze on the windows of the project room in dlr LexIcon.

www.dlrcoco.ie/arts

The Land of Zero, School within a School, a 2 day symposium in Crawford Gallery moderated by Anthony Haughey

More information here

Motivational Deficit
14 November 2014–17 January 2015
Michelle Browne
Brian Duggan
Anthony Haughey
Aaron Lawless
Orla McHardy
Eoin McHugh
David Sherry
Sonia Shiel

Motivational Deficit… at the Crawford Art Gallery, Cork features the work of eight contemporary Irish artists, whom within their art-making practice have marked the pervasive nature of how recession and austerity has crept, and sometimes smashed, into our lives. The works in the exhibition, created within the last five years, offer an antidote to the phenomenon of motivational deficit* – the perceived public disaffection with political and social engagement – where society’s relationship with the governmental policies that controls contemporary society is perceived as externally binding not internally compelling. Motivational Deficit…comes together at a time when according to government and market led sources, supported by the media, Ireland is on the cusp of new economic growth. The works in the exhibition can be viewed as a set of markers which are both a critical response and a reminder in considering how to move forward from the particular set of socio-economic circumstances Ireland currently resides. Motivational Deficit… also asks if there is appetite to reconsider the overall system to prompt what lessons can we bring forward to quell the acceleration, crash and systemic failures of the Celtic Tiger and beyond….

– See more at: http://www.crawfordartgallery.ie/exhibitionsupcoming_Motivational_Deficit.html#sthash.wjr4AUD9.dpuf