Hurray, the galleries are opening all over Ireland in May! Temple Bar Gallery + Studios is opening the gallery from Tuesday 11 May and we warmly welcome back our friends, artists, supporters, and all newcomers to our current exhibition Agitation Co-op.
This group exhibition brings together works by Michele Horrigan (IE), Catriona Leahy (IE), Laurie Robins (UK/US), Libita Sibungu (NM/UK), and is curated by Michael Hill, TBG+S Programme Curator. In this exhibition the four artists, working in film, sculpture, analogue photography and print, reflect on landscape and land, exploring the residue of heavy industrialisation as it impacts on environments and communities, leaving visible scars on terrains, strained further by demands of a global economy.
The reopening of galleries and museums marks a big moment for Irish society. The possibility to be physically with the art, lifts the spirit and brings a moment of ode to joy into our hearts. A more fulsome hurray, however, awaits the wider world emerging safely through all this. One thing, among many, which Covid 19 unveils is our connectivity to each other, and across time and across space.
We look forward very much to seeing you in our Gallery and hope you will enjoy your visit with us.
Michele Horrigan, Catriona Leahy, Laurie Robins, Libita Sibungu
Agitation Co-op
11 May – 10 July 2021
Agitation Co-op is an exhibition that investigates the subject of landscape from a range of vantage points; not only social and political ideologies but also, mapping and topography. The exhibition includes artworks by Michele Horrigan, Catriona Leahy, Laurie Robins, and Libita Sibungu. It is accompanied by an online screening programme highlighting films by Forensic Architecture, Melanie Smith, and Eva Richardson McCrea, Frank Sweeney and the Dublin Dockworkers Preservation Society.
The aerial perspective of this exhibition is utilised by the four artists to survey areas of geographical unsettlement that span continents and hemispheres of the globe. This diagrammatic view of the surface level illustrates present-day activity: boundaries and borders, the division of urban and rural, and ways in which mankind has imposed itself on the landscape through industry and habitat destruction. What’s more, the artists, through their individual practices, uncover faults in the terrain, exposing previously obscured subterranean narratives from throughout history that link the processes of natural resource extraction and industrialisation to their effects on the environment, and surrounding communities. In an Irish context, this relates to historical colonial rule and fragmentation of the landscape, and how these issues are echoed by a systemic market venture from the Irish Government over recent decades. Taking an international viewpoint these fissures are strained further by the global economy, the threat of war and mass displacement of populations. The seemingly disparate landscapes in this exhibition, both local and international, are connected below the surface, kept out of view by global power systems, but are unearthed by investigatory and determined artistic practices.
Temple Bar Gallery + Studios
5 – 9 Temple Bar, Dublin 2,
D02 AC84, Ireland
