Áine Mac Giolla Bhríde

Void Art Centre is pleased to present the first solo exhibition by Áine Mac Giolla Bhríde in the UK.

 

The exhibition takes place across the two galleries at Void Art Centre. Conventionally, of course, galleries are rooms dedicated to the viewing of art, but as spatial environments, they are often repurposed venues whose original function was not the presentation of artworks.  The galleries of Void Art Centre are located on the ground floor of the building, in a large, glass-fronted space, once a commercial unit host to a variety of businesses throughout the building’s lifetime. In 2021 two rooms of the ground floor were restructured to approximate ‘white cubes’, and sit within the larger edifice or shell. Galleries can be seen as somewhat emblematic of the adaptive and resourceful use of existing architecture today. 

 

Mac Giolla Bhríde’s work responds to this concrete architectural reality. Their sculptural practice performs an investigation of space and self, working through a personal body of research that looks at the theoretical and historical development of the figure of the architect. The artist is interested in how a pronounced masculinity was fused with the canonical image of the archetypal male architect, as a reaction to the entry of women into the field of architecture. The artist’s research reveals that women working as architects were sometimes perceived as belonging to a ‘third sex’, and that during the Modernist period women were encouraged to enter the field of decor or interior design as an alternative to pursuing architecture.

 

With son of, Mac Giolla Bhríde attempts to dismantle the complexity of these gendered hierarchies by consciously inhabiting the role of the builder, architect and interior designer simultaneously. This serves as a way of positioning themselves, and manifesting sculptural artwork responsive to site. Construction materials, such as salvaged glass panels and personal artifacts, are selected, gathered, deposited and arranged on site, finding resolution in a sculptural staging that reconciles inherited architectural histories with the immediate physical environment, via subjective reinterpretations from a feminist/queer perspective.

 

Áine Mac Giolla Bhríde – Biography

 

Áine Mac Giolla Bhríde is an artist working in the field of sculpture. Their work makes manifest considerations of site and the situated body via staged sculptural arrangements. Recent presentations include object as buoys in the life acted, solo exhibition at The Regional Cultural Centre, Letterkenny; From Here to There, three person show at The Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin; point of fold, solo show at mother’s tankstation gallery, Dublin; Feeling of Knowing group show at The Complex Gallery, Dublin; and a commissioned body of work, and/or land, for EVA International 2021/2020, Limerick. They are working with Kunstverein Aughrim throughout 2023/2024. Mac Giolla Bhríde is represented by mother’s tankstation Dublin | London and is supported by the Arts Council of Ireland.

 

Acknowledgements

Banu Cennetoğlu

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) was proclaimed by the United Nations General Assembly in Paris on December 10, 1948, three years after the end of World War II. According to the UN, it sets out, for the first time, fundamental human rights to be universally protected, and has been translated in over 500 languages.

 

Banu Cennetoğlu’s right? (2022 – ) presents the articles of the UDHR in bouquets of gold letter balloons. As the bouquets deflate during the run of the show, they will leave viewers to question whether any rights can remain without the labour of protecting, extending, and upholding them. It will be on display at Void Art Centre from 2 September – 1 November 2023.

 

Given the parameters of the work, space and duration of the exhibition, articles 11 and 12 will be on view. The first 10 articles of the UDHR were on view at Carnegie Museum of Art for the 58th Carnegie International in 2022-2023. A short video is displayed below which shows the work which was on display.

 

 

Video: Max Cianci, courtesy of Carnegie Museum of Art

 

In her cross-disciplinary practice, which includes photography, sculpture, and moving image, Cennetoğlu explores the impossibility of giving form to absence and how the process of attempting to do so deepens our understanding of loss. right? similarly asks if we can protect what is being undermined and never fully actualised as intended.

 

Banu Cennetoğlu biography

 

Banu Cennetoğlu is an Istanbul-based artist engaged in a wide range of cross-disciplinary practices. Her practice incorporates methods of archiving in order to question and challenge the politics of memory, as well as the production, distribution and consumption of information. 

 

Cennetoğlu has had solo exhibitions at institutions including K21 Ständehaus, Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf; Sculpture Center, New York; Chisenhale Gallery, London; Bonner Kunstverein; Salonul de proiecte, Bucharest; Kunsthalle Basel. She has participated in the Berlin, Istanbul, Liverpool, Gwangju, Athens and Venice Bienniale, as well as Manifesta 8 and documenta14. She is the founder of BAS, an artist-run space in Istanbul dedicated to artists’ books and printed matter. Banu Cennetoğlu is currently an advisor at the Rijksakademie, Amsterdam.

 

Acknowledgements

 

Void Gallery is supported using public funding from Arts Council Northern Ireland, Arts Council National Lottery Fund, All Island Fund, Austin and Hope Pilkington Foundation, Arnold Clarke Foundation, Bank of Ireland Begin Together Arts Fund, Community Foundation Ireland, Derry City and Strabane District Council, Enkalon Foundation, National Lottery Community Fund, The Ireland Funds, Ragdoll Foundation.

 

Series of colour and black and white logos

Shezad Dawood

Leviathan: We go elsewhere

 

17 June – 19 August 2023

 

Void Gallery is delighted to present Shezad Dawood, Leviathan: We go elsewhere.

 

Shezad Dawood’s Leviathan film series is an episodic exploration of the current challenges we face in the intersection between climate change, migration, and mental health. The film series envisages a future eerily like our present, whose inhabitants are the survivors of a cataclysmic solar event. Each film is written from the point of view of an individual character, providing insight into their trauma and pathological traits and giving each episode its own personality, visual language and rhythm. At Void Gallery we are premiering Episode 8 of the series that elucidates the indigenous perspective on the impact of climate change and the nature of the universe according to their culture. The film looks at the interconnections between nature and the indigenous community. In ways, proposing we move from an anthropocentric view to the era of the Symbioscience, an epoch that highlights the interconnection between nature and humans, living together for mutual benefit and moving towards an ecological philosophy.

 

Dawood’s suite of paintings, Labanof Cycle, are based on research with the Laboratory of Anthropological Forensics (Labanof) at the University of Milan – an institute that conducts research on personal effects lost by migrants during sea crossings to Lampedusa, in order to help families identify missing relatives. A series of artefacts and objects from the Labanof archive provide the visual references for the textile works. These were developed in dialogue with the renowned textile manufacturer Fortuny, and incorporate their handmade fabrics. These works are a poignant reminder of the ongoing migrant crisis that continues to develop throughout the world – most recently with the war in Sudan.

 

The film and textile pieces create this symbiotic relationship to the crisis in terms of the climate emergency and migration. The humanitarian echoes the wider ecological crisis through the loss of species throughout the world. Migration is exacerbated through climate events and the collapse of crops, from monoculture farming to the resource-rich countries that are subject to wars both external and internal. The capitalist pursuit of extraction and greed drive these interconnected crises we are faced with continually; at which point does it turn? Dawood interweaves these narratives from disparate regions to create an awareness and a means to have a more holistic view of how the future might be shaped.

 

Shezad Dawood Biography

 

Shezad Dawood is a multidisciplinary artist who interweaves stories, realities and symbolism to create richly layered artworks, spanning painting, textiles, sculpture, film and digital media. Fascinated by ecologies and architecture, his work takes a philosophical approach, asking questions and exploring alternative futures through what Dawood describes as ‘world-building’ and ‘imagineering’. His practice is animated by research, working with multiple audiences and communities to delve into narrative, history and embodiment.

 

His fascination with the esoteric, otherness, the environment and architectures both material and virtual, can be seen across numerous projects, most recently at Night in the Garden of Love: Inspired by & featuring Yusef Lateef; WIELS, Brussels (2023); Sea of Redemption, Shezad Dawood x Zien; Integrations, Barakat Contemporary, Seoul (2023); HMS Alice Liddell, St Pancras Wires commission, London (2022) and previously at institutions as varied as Tate Britain, MoMA, MOCA Toronto and the MORI Art Museum, Tokyo. His film works have been screened internationally, including at the ICA, London; MoMA and Guggenheim, New York.

 

To view the gallery guide please scan the QR code below:

 

Black and white rounded dots in a unique square configuration of a QR code.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Shezad in conversation with Mary Cremin

 

 

For further information about Shezad’s work and Leviathan please visit the links below:

 

Frontis

 

https://shezaddawood.com/

 

Reading list

 

You can view the full reading list which supports Shezad’s exhibition here: Leviathan Bibliography 9

 

Acknowledgements

 

This exhibition was curated by outgoing Director of Void Mary Cremin. Mary’s programme of exhibitions will run until winter 2024.

 

Promotional image credit: Shezad Dawood, Leviathan Cycle, Episode 8: Cris, Sandra, Papa & Yasmine, 2023. Single screen, HD video, 17:33. Commissioned by Hybrid Futures (a multi-part collaboration focusing on climate, sustainability, collaborative learning and co-production between Castlefield Gallery, Manchester; Grundy Art Gallery, Blackpool; Touchstones Rochdale; University of Salford Art Collection and Shezad Dawood Studio, and generously supported by Arts Council England and Art Fund), Leviathan — Human & Marine Ecology Ltd, Void Gallery, Derry.

 

Void Gallery is supported using public funding from Arts Council Northern Ireland, Arts Council National Lottery Fund, All Island Fund, Austin and Hope Pilkington Foundation, Arnold Clarke Foundation, Bank of Ireland Begin Together Arts Fund, Community Foundation Ireland, Derry City and Strabane District Council, Enkalon Foundation, National Lottery Community Fund, The Ireland Funds, Ragdoll Foundation.

 

Series of colour and black and white logos

 

Cement grey floor with white wall running around the background of the image. A TV screen sits facing the viewer on the floor and depicts a grey cloudy sky with a bundle of yellow and black wires. A TV screen is shown hanging on the wall in the background

Re_sett_ing_s

Void Art Centre is delighted to present Re_sett_ing_s by Locky Morris and Jaki Irvine.

 

In October 2022, Re_sett_ing_s – a collaborative exhibition between Locky Morris and Jaki Irvine – opened at The Complex Gallery, Dublin. The artists, who are probably best known for working solo, were approached separately by Mark O’ Gorman speculating on ‘hidden connections’. Unbeknownst to him, they had a close friend in common, artist Anne Tallentire, whose Setting Out 3 (2021), with its yellow builder’s string and hints at musicality, acted as a kind of starting point and touchstone for the development of the work.

 

The process involved a visit, another, getting a sense of each other’s practice, for the possibilities of lines of commonality, of the edges of things and thinking. Derry, Dublin, Derry. The Artnz Belting company on Pennyburn. The transmitter masts at Sheriff’s Mountain. A beach. A park. An overcast sky. Risks are inherent within such an approach. They didn’t know each other very well beforehand. What has emerged has been surprising, unexpected and according to the artists themselves, quite liberating.

 

The temporality of the work resonated with Void’s programme so an invitation was extended to continue the collaboration at Void. Coincidentally, Void has also had the pleasure of working with Anne Tallentire, so the connective thread continues. The artists agreed, not just to re-install the exhibition in a new setting, but to deepen the conversation, bringing other unforeseen tones and layers into play as they developed new work in response to Void’s invitation.

 

Locky Morris has become known recently for using Instagram as a way of thinking, communicating and making work. Executed mostly in the moment, during daily walks, he posts images and short videos and sees it as a form of parallel practice which is often sculptural in nature. The lines between each artist’s work became blurred and ultimately irrelevant as Jaki Irvine’s use of video installation and filmic and sonic influences creates a confluence of images and sound, where each artist inhabits and crosses over into the other’s work, responding, playing and overlapping in the manner of a conversation. Thoughts and ideas, excited and pensive, have produced a suite of looping images and sounds that are tight but also unruly. At once attentive and loose. Both artists happen to be musicians. Here the sonic elements – rhythms, industrial sounds – overlap, partly orchestrated, adding to the sense of a visual, digital, soundscape where new forms constantly mutate and develop, both within and beyond the gallery space.

 

We are delighted to have been able to commission the artists to expand this work and bring new filmic, digital and sound elements to Void Art Centre and beyond.

 

Jaki Irvine Biography

 

Jaki Irvine works with video installation, photography, music composition and  writing. Her immersive video and sound installations tell stories through fragmented, elliptical and open-ended narratives informed by rigorous research. Irvine picks out evocative details from the landscape or cityscape, in particular honing in on Dublin and Mexico City; two cities that have shaped and informed  her practice. Contested histories, sonic bricolage, the built environment, and the  customs and communities of a city’s residents have all found their way into Irvine’s deep-reaching and polyphonic work: songs that filter through a city’s streets, overheard conversations, the flap of a hummingbird’s wings are given equal gravitas. Her attention is often turned to the peripheral or the undervalued: re-centring stories or figures written out of history, particularly female figures, or presenting an alternative approach to the present, making space for strangeness. Humans and nature become intertwined in her imaginative worldview, with plants, birds and creatures permeating her practice, and adding to the sense of the unknown and unknowable, and blurring the boundary between the real and the imagined.

 

Locky Morris Biography

 

Locky Morris was born in Derry City where he continues to live and work. Renowned for his early work that explicitly dealt with the conflict in Northern Ireland – most notably from a socially embedded perspective – he has gone on to develop another working vocabulary that moves fluidly between the personal, public and political. While still informed by the complexities and intricacies of his immediate landscape, this work extends across photography, video, gallery installation and incorporates the social media platform, Instagram. Morris’s practice, born in part out of a fascination for what confronts him in the often  chaotic details of the everyday, is rich, inventive and marked by a visual playfulness that feels distinctly his own. Running parallel to this have been numerous large-scale works and interventions in the public realm. The work has  also been influenced by his active musicianship.

 

Download the gallery guide below:

Re_sett_ing_s gallery guide

 

Re_sett_ing_s_Knots

 

In conjunction with the current exhibition at Void Gallery – Re_sett_ing_s – artists Locky Morris and Jaki Irvine present Re_sett_ing_s_Knots as a billboard display located at Strand Road & Garden City, Derry, from 22 May – 4 June 2023.

 

Kindly supported by the Arts Council of Northern Ireland’s Organisations Digital Evolution Award, thanks to The National Lottery.

 

Acknowledgements

 

With thanks to Kerlin Gallery and Frith Street Gallery.

 

Kindly supported by the Arts Council of Northern Ireland’s Organisations Digital Evolution Award, thanks to The National Lottery.

 

Image credit: Simon Mills.

 

Void Art Centre is supported using public funding from Arts Council Northern Ireland, All Island Fund, Austin and Hope Pilkington Foundation, Arnold Clarke Foundation, Bank of Ireland Begin Together Arts Fund, Community Foundation Ireland, Derry City and Strabane District Council, Enkalon Foundation, National Lottery Community Fund, The Ireland Funds, Ragdoll Foundation.

frame of a straight road surrounded by grass

Luke Fowler

Void is delighted to present the premiere of Glaswegian artist Luke Fowler’s short feature film Being in a Place – A Portrait of Margaret Tait, featuring the work of filmmaker-poet, the late Margaret Tait.