Image: Atong Atem, Dust, commissioned by Catherine McKinley for PhotoIreland Festival 2023. Courtesy of the Artist.
Launch
6-8pm 30 June
Booking mandatory via Eventbrite
Talk
2pm Sat 1 July
Book Launch
4pm Sat 1 July
Running
1-23 July
The Printworks
Dublin Castle,
Dame St, Dublin 2
Opening Hours
Mon-Sun 10am-5pm
Tickets
Standard: €5 allowing for a second visit.
MultiPass: €20 allowing for a +1 and limitless entry.
Free copy of magazine OVER Journal issue 1 with every ticket available at the Museum counter.
Note: Entry during Tsundoku Art Book Fair is free.
Dust
Atong Atem
Catherine E. McKinley curates a photography-based multimedia work by artist Atong Atem, commissioned by PhotoIreland Festival. Dust explores the relationship of Dinka women, who act as mediums and custodians to the earth, to the rupturing history of Christianity and colonialism.
A publication, designed and printed by Dream Press for the occasion, will launch 4pm Saturday 1st July at The Printworks, Dublin Castle.
Atong Atem
Atong Atem is an Ethiopian born, South Sudanese artist and writer living in Narrm/ Melbourne.
Atem’s work explores the inherent intimacy of portraiture and photography as well as the role photographers take as story tellers. Atem interrogates photography as a framework for looking at the world and positioning people in it. She takes framing into a fantastical direction with the small portals over the subjects’ faces, inviting the viewer to look at them through a surreal and constructed lens.
Atem references the works of photographers Malick Sidibe, Philip Kwame Apagya and Seydou Keita to create a visual representation of a relationship to culture. She works primarily with photography and video to explore migrant narratives and postcolonial practices in the African diaspora, the relationship between public and private spaces and the exploration of home and identity through portraiture.
Atem has exhibited her work across Australia, including National Gallery of Victoria, Art Gallery of New South Wales, National Portrait Gallery, Immigration Museum, Gertrude Contemporary, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art and Internationally at Tate Modern, Photo London 2023, Photo Basel 2022, Red Hook Labs in New York and Vogue Fashion Fair in Milan. Atem was the recipient of the inaugural La Prairie Art Award from the Art Gallery of New South Wales, the 15 Artists 2022 prize from Moreton Bay Council in 2022, National Gallery of Victoria and MECCA M-Power scholarship in 2017 as well as the Brisbane Powerhouse Melt Portrait Prize in 2016.
Catherine E. McKinley
Catherine E. McKinley, a New York City based Fulbright Scholar and winner of numerous distinctions for her writing and curatorial work, is author of four critically acclaimed books, most recently The African Lookbook: A Visual History of 100 Years of African Women (Bloomsbury, 2021), which won the inaugural Eiger Foundation Prize for Best African Photobook. An exploration of Africa’s photographic history, fashion, trade history, and African women’s selfhood, the book features works from The McKinley Collection, a personal archive representing African photographies from 1870 to the present. Works from The McKinley Collection have been shown in international museums and galleries. The McKinley Collection is now available to artists, museums, curators, and researchers.
