Artists’ Film International

Crawford Art Gallery announces its collaboration with Artists’ Film International (AFI) for 2024. AFI is a touring film programme which is collectively curated and presented by fifteen international arts organisations and convened by Forma, London. AFI introduces the work of talented moving image artists to worldwide audiences, and will be live over 300 days, with exhibitions, screenings and public programmes hosted across four continents.

This year the AFI partners have commissioned or selected recent artists’ films which respond to the theme “Solidarity,” and Crawford Art Gallery has invited Irish artist Mary Sullivan to present her subtle yet powerful short film The Fine Line (2022).

Sullivan is an islander on the west coast of Ireland, and her cinematic postcard aesthetic creates an unsettling antidote to the precarious living and working conditions of so many women on small islands or archipelagos. Set in a harbour on an almost impossibly blue-sky, sun-soaked day, Sullivan’s film is a visually compelling meditation on the past generations of island women’s vital—but so often unseen, unacknowledged, and unpaid—work, whose daily toil includes the simple yet painstaking task of line-fishing.

At a time when women’s rights are being attacked and “watered down” from various political and social groups and island life is being threatened from climate change, Sullivan’s film underscores the importance of recognising the continual solidarity of generations of women, who have quietly helped and supported not only their communities but each other, physically and psychologically, and continue to do so.

Mary Sullivan is a visual artist, performer and islander who works with a variety of mediums including film, installation, performance and sculpture. Recent exhibitions and screenings include Irish Film Festival Los Angeles (2024), From the Inside Out and the Outside In, Uillinn: West Cork Arts Centre (2023) and National Botanic Gardens of Ireland (2021), and Futures 3, Royal Hibernian Academy, Dublin (2019). In 2018, Sullivan received the RDS Taylor Art Award for her work At Home, At War.

Crawford Art Gallery is a national cultural institution (Cork, Ireland) dedicated to contemporary and historic Irish and international visual art. It offers a dynamic programme of temporary exhibitions which probe the future, contemplate the present, and reveal the past to create engaging conversations across the timelines. Located in a significant heritage building in the heart of Cork city, it is also home to over 3,300 artworks from the National Collection.

Learn about the full cohort of artists, partners and AFI 2024 programme at artistsfilminternational.com.