New Exhibitions
Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane
Charlemont House
Parnell Square North
Dublin 1
Ireland
t: + 353 1 222 5550
e: info.hughlane [at] dublincity.ie
Yinka Shonibare
Egg Fight
Curated by Barbara Dawson, Director.
26 February – 30 August 2009
Commissioned by Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane, Yinka Shonibare has created an installation based on Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels. Shonibare’s work specifically relates to the lengthy battles between the fictitious empires of Lilliput and Blefuscu. The catalyst for this war was the hugely contentious issue of which end of the egg should be broken before eating.
When it was first published in 1726, Gulliver’s Travels created a furore. It was an attack on British foreign policy in the time of George 1st and the failure of the Whigs to end a prolonged war with France. The battle for supremacy between Catholics and Protestants in 18th century Europe was in Swift’s view trivial and futile. In this complex and powerful satire Swift lambastes imperial ambition.
Imperialism, colonialism and cultural identity are central themes in Yinka Shonibare’s work. A Nigerian artist living in London, he propagates a fiction of otherness to devastating effect, parodying cultural signifiers supposedly linked to national identity. His use of satire, and critical paradox has brought Shonibare considerable critical acclaim.
In addition to this commission, Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane is pleased to exhibit a new series of drawings by Yinka Shonibare, entitled Climate Shit Drawings.
Yinka Shonibare, MBE (b.1962) is a painter, photographer, filmmaker, and installation artist who has exhibited internationally. This is Shonibare’s first solo exhibition in Ireland.
Frequency
Curated by Michael Dempsey Head of Exhibitions
assisted by Logan Sisley and Padraic Moore
26 February – 17 May
Anachronistic in a secular society where almost every object has a defined function and end use, the works of artists Mark Garry, Pádraig Timoney and Hayley Tompkins expose and explore possibilities of contingency and transformation. Frequency raises questions of ethics and value that emerges in the work of these artists and their relationship to aesthetics. It encourages a re-examination of the established views of reality and provide us with points of departure for alternative frameworks with which we may rethink our perceived knowledge of the world.
The Golden Bough: Grace Weir: In my own time
Curated by Michael Dempsey Head of Exhibitions
26 February – 17 May
The myth of the Golden Bough as drawn by J.G. Frazer has operated widely in human society throughout history, producing in varied circumstances a variety of institutions, specifically different but generically alike.
Weir’s exhibition is an installation centred on her film, In my own time. The film consists of a series of interlinking episodes that explore philosophical, scientific and cross-cultural attitudes to perceptions of time. It explores the connection between the concept of one’s self as a being in time and the sense of one’s life as a narrative. Events in the film are portrayed in a rational, almost documentary style; but oscillate between fact and fiction and between documentary and cinematic illusion.
Forming the rest of the installation are two works, one an animation called Clock shows a dandelion seed head rotating on its stem. The other, Script 1, is the first in a new series of short films, showing the artist creating pinholes in a piece of paper to spell out words, relevant to the filmed activity or making reference to filmic terms, which appear when held up to a beam of light.
Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane
Charlemont House
Parnell Square North
Dublin 1
Ireland
t: + 353 1 222 5550
e: info.hughlane [at] dublincity.ie
