News
News
Artists respond to underground Irish “nuclear bunker” for upcoming group show Apocalypse Anxieties at Luan Gallery
16 March
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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
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“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 full text here ︎︎︎
16 March
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 full text here ︎︎︎
Ten artists awarded studios at Temple Bar Gallery + Studios
24 January 2024Temple Bar Gallery + Studios announces the recipients of the TBG+S/HIAP International Residency Exchange 2024
24 January 2024Temple 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.
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.
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.
The Art Academy of Riga launch collaborative publication at Zuzeum Art Centre
December 2023
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The Art Academy of Latvia are delighted to launch the publication POST: Prodiction No. 2 of ∞ at Zuzeum Art Centre, Riga. This publication is edited by Katie Zazenski with texts by Léann Herlihy and Tonatiuh López, and visual essays from the students of MA POST, Art Academy of Latvia, The Creative Industry and Growth Management - Latvian Culture Academy, and the New Media Art and Design program from Liepāja University.
Read more here ︎︎︎
Artists announced for Catalyst Arts’ biennial of performance art FIX23
09 - 25 November September 2023
Catalyst Arts are delighted to share our finalised FIX23 Programme which includes a fantastic array of artists and performers from Belfast and beyond. This year, performances are taking place across our beloved city, at Catalyst Arts in 6 Joy's Entry, Cornmarket, Portview Trade Centre, SARC and online.
Featuring artists: Bbeyond, Bebeedeebe, Léann Herlihy, Lili Murphy Johnston, Mal Parry, Matthew Wilson, Olivia Hassett, Sandra Johnston, Sinéad O'Donnell, Son Zept, Tara McGinn and Venus Patel.
Expanded Programme ︎︎︎
a cartography of the middle of nowhere now available at Sticky Fingers Publishing, London.
11 November 2023
Léann Herlihy’s publication, a cartography of the middle of nowhere (2022), will be available at the inaugural Sticky Fingers Publishing Fair; an event bringing together Sticky Fingers’ friends, collaborators and allies for a fair celebrating feminist, queer, disabled-led and local interdisciplinary publishing.
Access information and other announced publications here ︎︎︎
The Arts Council of Ireland award Léann Herlihy Visual Art Bursary to expand their transdisciplinary project With Eerything We’ve Got!
17 October 2023
Léann Herlihy has been awarded a Visual Arts Bursary 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.
Léann Herlihy presents With Everything We’ve Got! [warm-up] (2023), an hour-long performance, as part of group exhibition Reflex Blue at Temple Bar Gallery + Studios.
02 September 2023, 2-3pm
Approaching this as a 60-minute training session, Herlihy will attempt to fall through the frameworks experienced by those who regularly, and sometimes deliberately, fall out of recognition. Descending through the gaps in the System which has historically denied their presence, Herlihy approaches this active state of falling as a contrary embodiment; a refusal to situate themself in relation to a destination, a final form, a specific shape, or an established configuration of desire and/or identity.
Acting as a precursor to this performance, an asterisk [*] marks the site of this warm-up. A diacritical character, the * poses a question to its prefix, signalling towards a politics based on instability which is orientated towards social transformation, rather than political accommodation.
Performance Access Information here ︎︎︎
Building Access Information here ︎︎︎
Reflex Blue opens at Temple Bar Gallery + Studios with Lyndon Barrois Jr., Elisa Giardina Papa & Léann Herlihy
28 July- 24 September 2023
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This exhibition brings together the individual practices of Lyndon Barrois Jr., Elisa Giardina Papa, and Léann Herlihy. All three artists use language and image-making to disrupt ways of understanding and communication that are supposedly universal. Each artist’s work explores the cultural impact of images and their relationship to storytelling and technology. Using formatting, modification, compositing and erasure, their work seizes instances of multiplicity and mystery.
Lyndon Barrois Jr. is interested in the sleight-of-hand that relates the cinematic world with that of an artwork conservator. Embracing the power and limitations of print media processes, he uses the suspension of belief as a moment where an alternate reality and history can become conceivable.
Elisa Giardina Papa’s film installation “U Scantu”: A Disorderly Tale, invokes historically overlooked multi-species mythologies and practices of healing. The film and accompanying ceramic sculptures depict iconography from Sicilian fables and oral tradition from what the artist describes as a “socio-poetic and socio-magical” archive.
Léann Herlihy’s With Everything We’ve Got! takes stylistic reference from alt text/image description, and utilises frameworks of coalition building. This body of work moves against common understandings of sporting bodies and situates itself as a warm-up for an expansive project that realises an active state of losing/falling as an embodied response to systemic injustice.
Reflex Blue is accompanied by a programme that expands the ideas and methodologies of the exhibition through artist talks, film screenings, publication and performance. Invited artists are Michael Hanna, Joseph Noonan-Ganley, Alice Rekab x Stephen Rekab.
Expanded Programme ︎︎︎
Artists announced for the 40th EVA International
26 April 2023
EVA International is delighted to announce the full list of participating artists for the 40th EVA International – Ireland’s Biennial of Contemporary Art, opening across venues in Limerick city from 31 August through to 29 October 2023.
Guest Programme: The Gleaners Society
Curated by Sebastian Cichocki, the Guest Programme of the 40th EVA International takes its thematic basis on the idea and practice of gleaning – a term that traditionally refers to the act of collecting leftover crops following a harvest. The Gleaners Society extends this reference in a multiple of ways, alternately serving as an artistic subject, a political metaphor, and a curatorial methodology to explore and propose art’s relationship to society. Featuring over 45 presentations by Irish and international artists and collectives, The Gleaners Society will unfold across a set of uniquely diverse venues in Limerick city (civic arts institutions, a primary school, a Cathedral, and a vegetarian cafe, among others).
“Convening the programme, I focused mainly on practices of artists engaged in generating social change and focused on daily chores, often unheroic and unspectacular and not always resulting in a tangible work of art. EVA International is a unique exhibition environment where such experiments are possible” – Sebastian Cichocki.
See announced artists and collectives here ︎︎︎
Stroboskop Gallery selects Léann Herlihy’s The Field [stage directions] (2022) to represent the gallery at KIN, a collaborative exhibition in Milchhof Pavillon, Berlin.
07 April 2023
Stroboskop and super bien! are pleased to announce KIN, a collaborative exhibition happening between 12 independent spaces in Berlin and Warsaw. This project demonstrates the blur, the connections, and the unique positions that these spaces take on in the contemporary art ecosystem.
Read more ︎︎︎
Léann Herlihy reflects on their recent performance to be nowhere (2022) at Project Arts Centre in the March/April 2023 Issue of The Visual Artists’ News Sheet.
06 March 2023
In columns for VAN March/April issue, Iarlaith Ni Fheorais’s outlines a forthcoming access toolkit for curators and producers, while Cornelius Browne considers some of the pragmatic and conceptual connections between underground filmmaking and plein air painting. For our latest new column series, Memento Mori, Day Magee reflects on the significance of losing their father and the profound art of human grief, while Neva Elliot discusses her new body of work, ‘How to Create a Fallstreak’, which is dedicated to her late husband.
The March/April issue also features Career Development interviews with George Bolster and Alice Rekab about their solo exhibitions in West Cork and Munich respectively. Exhibition reviews in this issue include: Seán Fingleton at Copperhouse; John Beattie, ‘Reconstructing Mondrian’ at the Hugh Lane Gallery; ‘Image as Protest’ at Cristea Roberts Gallery in London; and Siobhan McGibbon, ‘Xenophon: Making Oddkin with Japanese Knotweed’ at Galway Arts Centre. Also profiled are Greywood Arts, The Museum of Everyone, Léann Herlihy’s recent performance at Project Arts Centre, and Doireann O’Malley’s new 3D theatre play, Conversations on a Crosstown Algorithm (2022).
Read here ︎︎︎
Temple Bar Gallery + Studios launches their 2023 Artistic Programme
24 February 2023
TBG+S is a leading artists’ studio complex and contemporary art gallery. For 40 years, we supported hundreds of artists in 30 high-quality, light-filled and affordable studios in Dublin city. The Gallery is part of a network of artistic spaces critical to exhibiting contemporary art in Ireland. We are delighted to mark 40 years of artists working and exhibiting in the city, and we look forward to the year ahead. A limited edition poster based on the painting ‘"He could see behind himself" St Columba’, 2022 by Isabel Nolan is specially commissioned by TBG+S to celebrate 40 years of artists working in the city (1983–2023).
Our 2023 Exhibition Programme includes the Ireland at Venice Tour of Niamh O’Malley’s ‘Gather’; Fanny Gicquel, winner of the Prix du Frac Bretagne – Art Norac Award; a group exhibition of work by Lyndon Barrois Jr., Elisa Giardina Papa, and Léann Herlihy; and Atoosa Pour Hosseini’s ‘The Magic Circle’.
Read more ︎︎︎
Temple Bar Gallery + Studios presents Hedge School, a free art programme for adult participants with a special interest in radical pedagogies facilitated by TBG+S Artist Alumni, Léann Herlihy.
01 February 2023
Recognising that the criteria used to classify curricula will always be insufficient, Hedge School disrupts the Western fixation on fixity, and thus, this school’s syllabus is in a constant state of reform. Participants of Hedge School will attend one session a week over a four-week period. Hedge School is part of Temple Bar Gallery + Studios’ learning and public engagement Spring School Programme.
Read more ︎︎︎
Dublin Fringe awards Léann Herlihy The Next Stage Wild Card Award for their bus tour Beyond Survival School Bus
23 September 2022
Dublin Fringe awarded a bursary to Léann Herlihy, enabling them to participate in the Next Stage – an artist development programme run by Dublin Theatre Festival in partnership with Theatre Forum.
Presented by Theatre Forum in partnership with Dublin Theatre Festival, the Next Stage is the artist development strand of Dublin Theatre Festival. Over the 18 days of the festival, participants are immersed in the programme and given access to an array of leading artists in a packed schedule of talks, interviews, group time and workshops. The Next Stage has been lauded by alumni as “a rare amount of inspiration” and “career changing”.
Read more ︎︎︎
The Arts Council of Ireland announce their acquired works to add to the Arts Council Collection
28 December 2022
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The Arts Council of Ireland acquire three artworks from Léann Herlihy to add to the Arts Council Collection. These artworks span an array of mediums, from Herlihy’s recent docu-film Beyond Survival (2022) and billboard Beyond Survival Expert (2022). Most significantly, Herlihy’s live performance i’d rather be a fag than be your bird has been acquired and becomes a part of the burgeoning collection of live performances within the collection.
The Arts Council of Ireland award Léann Herlihy the Next Generation Artist Award
18 July 2022
The Arts Council is delighted to announce the recipients of the 2022 Next Generation Artist Award.
The Next Generation bursaries are awarded to promising emerging artists across all disciplines at an early but pivotal stage of their careers. The award allows artists to buy time to develop their work and to be able to show their potential to advance and strengthen a distinctive and assured creative practice. The successful recipients have demonstrated in a compelling way how the award and the financial investment at this particular time will have a transformative effect in bringing them to the next stage of their artistic development.
Arts Council Director, Maureen Kennelly said, “I am really excited by the range and diversity of these young artists who have received these awards. These bursaries offer artists valuable time to cultivate their artistic voice, develop their practice and pursue their vision. I look forward to seeing the work of the Next Generation.”
Read more ︎︎︎