Artists’ Film International 2025

Crawford Art Gallery announces its sixth collaboration with Artists’ Film International (AFI) for 2025. AFI is a touring film programme which is collectively curated and presented by sixteen 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 Dream States. 

Crawford Art Gallery has invited Irish artist Elinor O'Donovan to present her short film Wild Geese 2: Wilder Geese (2023). O’Donovan’s film is a playful response to the poem “Wild Geese” by Mary Oliver, contemplating the extent to which the universe is concerned with our individual problems. Featuring Barry Manilow, mountains with eyes, and the self-involved thoughts of wild geese, this is a tongue-in-cheek consideration of the relationship between our natural surroundings and our imagination. 

Elinor O'Donovan uses film, installation, digital collage, and sculpture to speculate playful answers to questions about knowledge, memory, and truth. Her work centres on exploring how stories shape our understanding of ourselves and the worlds we inhabit. Through her work, she interrogates the blurred boundaries between fact and fiction, embracing the idea that everything we think we know is, to some degree, a constructed narrative.

O'Donovan draws heavily on pop cultural references and tropes as tools for meaning-making, using the shorthand of shared cultural symbols to create playful and humorous works. By remixing and recontextualising these elements, she invites viewers to question the worldviews they take for granted.

O’Donovan received her BA from Edinburgh College of Art in 2019. Since then, she has exhibited in solo and group shows in Ireland, UK, South Korea, Portugal, Italy, Mexico and USA. She has received numerous accolades in Ireland, including being shortlisted for the 2024 Golden Fleece Award, a commission from the National Sculpture Factory and Cork City Council (2024), the Jane Anne Rothwell Award 2024 (Cork Midsummer Festival), and the inaugural Cork International Film Festival Commission Award (2021). Forthcoming solo exhibitions include Sirius Arts Centre, Cobh, Ireland (2026) and 36 Lime Street, Newcastle, UK (2027). 

All AFI'25 screenings at the Arc Cinema, Cork are free and will take place at 18:30 on Monday 6, 13, and 20 October with a Q&A with Elinor O'Donovan on Monday 6 October. For further information about the artists and partners and to book tickets click here.

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. It is currently closed to the public to enable the major redevelopment project, Transforming Crawford Art Gallery, and is due to reopen in 2028.