Chris Clarke writes a response to Beyond Survival School Bus (2024) at TULCA Festival of Visual Arts in Art Monthly

01 December 2024



“After a three-hour coach trip from Cork to Galway, it’s somewhat daunting to immediately step onto Léann Herlihy’s Beyond Survival Schoo Bus, 2024. While being driven through the surrounding countryside, Herlih expands on a range of topics, ably assisted by designated members of the troupe: the patriarchal-capitalist subtext of the 1939 children’s song ‘The Wheels on the Bus’, the copyright battle between the Amazon rainforest and Amazon.com, the incel-adjacent ethos underpinning survivalist or ‘prepper ideologies, and how American reality television has usurped supposedl educational formats such as National Geographic and the History Channel. “Nature is often constructed as the province of white cis-heterosexual men,” they explain, “and thus to work with this ideology of ‘nature’ is to take a risk of re-engaging with a pre-conceived social order. But hey, hey, hey, I would risk it any day, for an alternative vision of natural phenomena which will de-centre the rigid social order and provide us with new ways of living beyond immediate survival.” Eventually, we all disembark and led by Ranger Herlihy, in camouflage assless chaps, trek through the bog to a large boulder, overseen by looming wind turbines. Here, they explain the significance of the kerchiefs we’d all been given: used in gay cruising scenes, the colour an placement of bandanas indicate one’s sexual fetish (black for S&M, red fo fisting, and so on). The handkerchiefs, patterned from rubbings against stone, are marked at four cardinal points with brightly coloured orange words: Anything, Anytime, Nothing, Now. A limitless world of variations is contained within those four terms.”

Purchase Art Monthly issue here ︎︎︎

VROOM (2019) to be screening during upcoming group show In Pieces: Navigating the Body in Contemporary Irish Art at the Glucksman

29 November 2024 - 09 March 2025 



The Glucksman is pleased to announce In Pieces: Navigating the Body in Contemporary Irish Art; a group show curated by Chris Clarke.

In Pieces looks at how Irish contemporary artists have explored the body as subject, material and medium. Its portrayal can signify identity, sexuality, vitality, illness, wholeness and disintegration, and, through works in various media, the exhibition addresses the ways in which we perceive ourselves. In emphasizing the fragmented body, the partial glimpse or reflection, In Pieces also recognizes the diversity of these representations. 

Read more here ︎︎︎

In Pieces: Navigating the Body in Contemporary Irish Art featured in e-flux

29 November 2024



“In Léann Herlihy’s filmed exploration of trans* identities, the artist sits in a van, igniting the engine before replacing the pressure enforced by their feet with two large rocks. Stepping out of the van, the ghost engine roars while their fleshy body emulates the reverberations...”

Read full text here ︎︎︎

Beyond Survival School Bus: AUDIO TOUR (2024) launches in partnership with TULCA Festival of Visual Arts

21 November 2024



Léann Herlihy is pleased to announce the release of Beyond Survival School: AUDIO TOUR (2024) in partnership with TULCA Festival of Visual Arts for the festival’s 2024 iteration. 

Beyond Survival School Bus: AUDIO TOUR (2024) is an audio tour with a pedagogical discourse spanning eighteenth-century hedge schools to twenty-first-century school tours. This cassette tape is adapted from a 90-minute free bus tour originally performed live at Dublin Fringe Festival (2022) and TULCA Festival of Visual Arts (2024).  

Read more here ︎︎︎
Available to purchase here ︎︎︎

UTOPIA (2024) launches at Dublin Art Book Fair

21 November - 01 December 2024



Léann Herlihy is pleased to announce the release of UTOPIA (2024) at Dublin Art Book Fair in Temple Bar Gallery + Studios. UTOPIA (2024) is a car bumper sticker which takes stylistic reference from the original black and white oval country code stickers which were designed in the 1940s by the United Nations to distinguish international traffic in Europe. 

Read more here ︎︎︎
Available to purchase here ︎︎︎

GCN features queer artists participating in upcoming Dublin Art Book Fair at Temple Bar Gallery + Studios

 
13 November 2024



“Temple Bar Gallery + Studios has unveiled the lineup for the 14th edition of the Dublin Art Book Fair (DABF), scheduled for November 21 through December 1, 2024. Under this year’s theme, ‘Fictions: The makings of other worlds’, Ireland’s premier art book fair offers a curated selection of publications that explore the transformative nature of art, literature, and activism through a diverse array of artists and independent publishers.’ 

Read more here ︎︎︎

Eunice Bélidor writes a response to Precarious Joys (2024) at Toronto Biennial of Art in Hyperallergic

04 November 2024



“Larger-than-life works such as Léann Herlihy’s “to be nowhere” (2022-ongoing), a billboard at Abell Street and Queen Street West (part of an ongoing photography series), and Rajni Perera’s sculpture “Vimana (N1 Starfighter)” (2024), installed at the Toronto Sculpture Garden, address the topic of space. While Herlihy centers queer and trans experiences to express how these communities occupy and transform space through a massive self-portrait showing their bound chest, Perera’s modern rendition of a spacecraft made of bamboo and rice paper lanterns confronts Western conceptions of advanced aerospace technology through immigration and space travel by fusing science fiction with traditional Buddhist Vesak kūdu.”

Read more here ︎︎︎

TULCA launch new publication The Salvage Agency (2024) on the occasion of the 22nd edition of TULCA Festival of Visual Arts

01 November 2024



TULCA Publishing is pleased to announce the release of its latest publication as part of this year's TULCA Festival of Visual Arts programme.

The Salvage Agency considers the agency and role of art in contemporary ecology and environmental action. Galway, on the edge of the northeast Atlantic, is a unique location for a heightened awareness of what is at stake. Explorations of landscape, seascape and nature, public space, colonial history, political structures, the industrial complex and folk narratives are all pertinent. These are paths taken by our collective society in the shaping of today’s world and a contemporary Europe.

Read more here ︎︎︎
Available to purchase here ︎︎︎

The Arts Council of Ireland award Léann Herlihy a Project Award to expand their transdisciplinary project With Everything We’ve Got! over 2025

29 October 2024



Léann Herlihy has been awarded a Project Award from the Arts Council of Ireland to expand their transdisciplinary project With Everything We’ve Got! (2023 - ongoing).

The Visual Arts Bursary will facilitate the research & development of With Everything We've Got!; an expanding transdisciplinary project which rigorously and creatively critiques the positioning of Otherness in a heteronormative society. Transgressing beyond 'Other' as another tick-box to choose from, With Everything We've Got! moves to explore the generative capacity of collective engagement and resistance when we abolish colonial and capitalist prescriptions of personhood, the body and gender.

Artists announced for the 22nd  edition of TULCA Festival of Visual Arts

01 November 2024



TULCA Festival of Visual Arts is pleased to announce the programme of its 22nd festival edition, titled The Salvage Agency curated by Michele Horrigan.

TULCA 2024 will be presented across multiple venues and locations in Galway from 1-17 November 2024. Established as the west of Ireland’s key annual showcase of contemporary art, TULCA continues to embrace Galway’s art institutions, cultural initiatives and public space together, presenting Irish and international artistic positions vital to our understanding of life today.
The Salvage Agency considers the agency and role of art in contemporary ecology and environmental action. Michele Horrigan notes “Galway, on the edge of the northeast Atlantic, is a unique location for a heightened awareness of what is at stake. Explorations of landscape, seascape and nature, public space, colonial history, political structures, the industrial complex and folk narratives are all pertinent. These are paths taken by our collective society in the shaping of today’s world and a contemporary Europe. Can art create an undercurrent of improvisation and frugality, haphazard formality, and change to offer new perspectives, provocations and empathy? From the wreckage, can art nourish a new reality?”

Read more here ︎︎︎
See full programme here ︎︎︎

The Arts Council of Ireland award Léann Herlihy a Visual Art Bursary to expand their transdisciplinary practice over 2025

02 October 2024

Toronto Biennial of Art launch publication Precarious Joys

21 September 2024



Precarious Joys accompanies the 2024 edition of the Toronto Biennial of Art — a city-wide exhibition that this year focuses on artists’ responses to the impact of colonialism on everyday life. Featuring over 120 full-colour images of artwork — including works by Ahmed Umar, Charles Campbell, Dineo Seshee Bopape, Maria Hupfield, Sonia Boyce, Tessa Mars, and Winsom Winsom — as well as a series of conversations between artists, curators, activists, educators, and cultural organizers, Precarious Joys highlights the connections and common practices that appear across the art featured in the Biennial.

The works and conversations included in this celebration of the 2024 Toronto Biennial of Art address the wide-ranging effects of colonialism, tackling issues as diverse as environmental degradation, self-representation and belonging, queer futurity, and migrant diasporas. The result is a volume that emphasizes the importance of entering a collective dialogue at the intersection of art practices, social knowledge, and public action and serves as a meeting place of multiple vocabularies, geographies, and political communities.
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Available for purchase here ︎︎︎

Toronto Biennial of Art featured in Frieze

September 2024

Michaële Cutaya writes a response to Apocalypse Anxieties (2024) in Visual Arts News Sheet

July - August 2024



“For ‘Apocalpyse Anxieties’, curator and artist Kerry Guinan takes a Cold War-era rumour about a ‘nuclear bunker’ under Custume Barracks in Athlone as a catalyst for an exhibition across the road in the Luan Gallery (27 April - 27 June 2024). That it was not really a nuclear bunker —its official name was ‘Integreated National Control Centre—matters little, as what intrigues Guinan is how the threat of nuclear Armageddon manifested in government preparations...

Survivalists take existential threats and make them the very core of their everyday life. For Beyond Survival (2022), Léann Herlihy re-enacts survivalist reality shows. The film alternates confessions straight to the camera with roaming shots; the camera cheekily attached between the legs of the protagonist gives us a crotch perspective of their movements. Herlihy has good fun playing with the testosterone-driven would-be-survivor tropes, but also teases out the question of queer survival and how it might reconfigure the genre...”

Read more here ︎︎︎

Artists announced for the Toronto Biennial of Art

13 May 2024



The Toronto Biennial of Art and its curatorial team of Dominique Fontaine and Miguel A. López are thrilled to announce the 36 artists, including one collective, that will be participating in TBA 2024! ⁠
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The Biennial is also excited to share the title, Precarious Joys, and exhibition venues for its third edition, which will be presented from September 21 to December 1, 2024, at 12 locations throughout Toronto. ⁠
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Explore the complete list of artists and venues, and learn more about the curatorial process ︎︎︎

Gemma Tipton writes a response to Apocalypse Anxieties (2024) in The Irish Times

April 2024



“...I can’t remember how I first came across the bunker,” says Kerry Guinan. We are in one of the guardhouses at Custume Barracks, in Athlone, waiting to explore Ireland’s “secret” government fallout shelter, and there’s a frisson of excitement in the assembled group. Who knew there was a nuclear bunker in the heart of Ireland? Imaginations, running on an Ernst Blofeld/Dr No kind of track, are shortly due to be pretty disappointed...

Léann Herlihy shows work from a series of projects, which also highlight the macho nature of survival culture. “It’s survival as a learning process,” they say. “I came to the idea of survival from a different realm: who’s allowed to be there, who is allowed to occupy these spaces?”...

Art may not stop the apocalypse, but it can open our eyes to what is out there, hiding in plain sight..”

Artists respond to underground Irish “nuclear bunker” for upcoming group show Apocalypse Anxieties (2024) at Luan Gallery

16 March 2024



Luan Gallery is pleased to announce Apocalypse Anxieties; a contemporary art exhibition curated by artist Kerry Guinan, which responds thematically, aesthetically, and affectively to an underground “nuclear bunker” installed by the Irish Government under Custume Barracks, Athlone during the Cold War. The exhibition uses the bunker as a reference point to express apocalypse anxieties past and present, posing critical questions about how disasters are communicated and planned for and who will ultimately survive them. 

In the context of our current seismic survival crises, the exhibition intends to provide a space for primitive fear and existential dread to be collectively felt, as mediated by the aesthetic lexicons of the speculative, the survivalist, the gothic, and the eerie.

Expanded Programme ︎︎︎

Rachel Donnelly writes a response to Reflex Blue (2023) in Paper Visual Art

28 February 2024



“Elsewhere in the gallery, Léann Herlihy’s With Everything We’ve Got! (2023) shows the body un-gridded, in freefall, dislocated from the binaries of up and down. In the atrium, a neon-green floor vinyl of an asterisk, a ‘gender star’, breaks a straight metal line embedded in the floor into multiple strands of possibility. Herlihy performed on the star as part of the extended programme of the exhibition, enacting falling over and over – falling through cracks, falling through social codes.

In the main gallery space, pieces of gym kit lie scattered, like parts of a body disassembled. A lone neon-green sock edges around a corner; a foam roller nestles in the armhole of a gym bib, like a truncated arm itself; a pair of white trainers are poised on starting blocks in the window. It’s as though the body has been taken apart to allow for the reshuffling of its coordinates on the x and y axes of gender normativity.”

Read more here ︎︎︎

Temple Bar Gallery + Studios announces the recipients of the TBG+S/HIAP International Residency Exchange 2024

28 February 2024



Temple Bar Gallery + Studios is delighted to announce Léann Herlihy (IE) and Hanna Ijäs (FI) as the recipients of TBG+S/HIAP International Residency Exchange, 2024.

Now in its 18th year, the TBG+S/HIAP International Residency Exchange gives an Irish or Ireland-based artist the opportunity to spend three months at HIAP - Helsinki International Artist Programme. The selected artist has access to production facilities, visiting curators and an international network of artists. In return, TBG+S hosts a Finnish or Finland-based artist in Dublin for two months, kindly funded by the Finnish Institute London.

Read more here ︎︎︎

Ten artists awarded studios at Temple Bar Gallery + Studios

24 January 2024



Temple Bar Gallery + Studios is pleased to announce the awarded artists from the open call for Three Year Membership Studios and Project Studios.

Three Year Membership Studios have been awarded to Rachel Fallon, Léann Herlihy, Atsushi Kaga, Barbara Knežević, Frank Sweeney, and Luke van Gelderen. Project Studios have been awarded to Ella Bertilsson, Jialin Long, Marie Farrington, and Áine O’Hara.

Three Year Membership Studios at Temple Bar Gallery + Studios offer a long-term tenure to artists who have developed an established, professional practice. Project Studios offer a one-year tenure to artists who are developing exciting emerging practices and demonstrate talent and potential. The artists were awarded their studios by a selection panel following an open submission application process. The panel included current TBG+S Studio members and established curators based in Ireland and internationally. The selected artists are representative of the exceptionally high-quality and rigorous contemporary art practices in Ireland today. We look forward to welcoming them all into the TBG+S community.

See announced artists here ︎︎︎

Katie Zazenski writes about working with Léann Herlihy in her text PUBLIC SPACE AND THE INTERNET: Digital gestures of radical love, blur, and resistance (2024)

January 2024



“As the idea for this publication unfolded, the work of Léann Herlihy came to mind. We first met in Warsaw in 2018, Léann joined for an event I used to host called Community Crit. They presented their practice to the group, and somehow this evolved into their solo exhibition at Stroboskop, Warsaw in 2019, Trojan Horse, which included a large hybrid steel sculpture of a pommel horse, photographs of sculptures, a wall drawing, and a performance by Herlihy, somehow centering around power and the political nature of the historical and contemporary female body. Shortly thereafter, Herlihy relocated to their home country, and since then we have essentially been connected via the Internet. Through the Internet I have followed their evolution in selfhood as expressed through their art practice, which, according to their website, is a rigorous and creative critique on the position of Otherness in a heteronormative society, actively transgressing beyond 'Other' as another tick-box option. Léann has evolved into a practitioner that moves with a deeply sensitive intensionality, and it is their more recent work which delves into the relationship between text, image, the body, and the performativity of the physical body, both online and offline.”