Contemporary Art from Irland 2

Out of Place

Camilla Fanning , Oona Hyland , Grace Sexton

Opening: Friday, 5. Juliy2024, 7 pm

5.–28. Juli 2024

The title of the exhibition plays with the different meanings of the phrase ‘out of place’, which can be understood literally as a term for something that is not in its original place, also with a connotation of being lost or disoriented, and in a figurative sense it means that something is inappropriate, very similar is the German ‘deplatziert’, also a place metaphor:.

In the exhibition, the three Irish artists Camilla Fanning, Oona Hyland and Grace Sexton deal with different aspects of the displacement of either people or natural phenomena, things that are not in the place where we expect to find them. The artists thus bring the periphery to the centre, making the overlooked and repressed visible.

Camilla Fanning is showing a complex installation consisting of a sound work, book objects and prints in the back room of the gallery. Sounds from the wilderness of Inis Oirr, an island on the westernmost edge of Europe, are juxtaposed with artist’s books and works on paper arranged into a landscape. In these print works, textures are reminiscent of natural structures, while cartographic elements – numbers, letters – evoke associations of scientific data, the human endeavour to order, measure and tame nature. In this contrasting of the wild with scientific abstraction, the work questions our relationship to the earth, to the environment and to that which usually escapes our perception on the fringes of civilisation.

Oona Hyland’s series Fragments from the Floating World in the gallery’s large room is about decay, time and the hidden. The work is simultaneously very concrete and very abstract and consists of large mokuhanga woodcuts hanging from the ceiling on translucent paper, printed with metallic ink so that they change as they move in the light. At times the print is difficutl to see and sometimes both sides of the sheets are printed and can be seen at once. The artist used the insides of tree bark fragments; traces of insect damage can be seen in the prints. The variations of the same woodblock overlapping and printed in different ways echo ideas about the various ways we relate the past. With the title, Hyland alludes to the Edo period in Japan, in which ukiyo denoted the floating world, the ephemeral half-world of theatre and art of the emerging middle classes. She relates the Japanese ukiyo to our present time, which is uncertain, ephemeral, an illusion where we indulge in escapism while the rest of the world seems to sink into violence and extremes.

Grace Sexton’s film Rhythm in Resilience (2024) about twelve-year-old saxophone prodigy Yegor, who fled to Ireland from Ukraine, can be seen in the gallery corridor. The artist and filmmaker met him on the street in Dublin, where he was busking, as Ireland’s youngest street musician. In the film, Yegor plays with Irish musicians Rónán Ó Snodaigh (bodhran) and Sean Furey (saxophone). The film tells the story of how the young refugee Yegor finds hope and resilience in music.

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The exhibition is supported by