RELAY 2023

Launch
6-8pm 30 June
Booking mandatory via Eventbrite

Artists Tour
12pm 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.

RELAY

Daranijoh Sanni, Samantha Brown, Tobi Balogun

RELAY is a new artist-driven and artist-focused mentorship programme by PhotoIreland. Each year, RELAY will see an invited artist engaging in a mentorship and development process with emerging artists, responding to the thematics of the festival. In 2023, the invited artist is Alice Rekab working with Irish and Ireland-based artists from of the African diaspora, selected through an open call: E The Artist (Daranijoh Sanni), Samantha Brown, and Tobi Balogun. The Digital Hub kindly supported the programme providing studios for the participant artists in the lead-up to the exhibition.

Find out about the presented projects below

REFRACTION, E The Artist’s BLACKBOYSBLUSH*

Through the interweaving of interviews, frequencies, and physical symbolism, E The Artist captures and reimagines the experience of cultural immersion through the lenses of both the perceiver and the perceived in contemporary Ireland. Referencing and recreating flags lies at the core of this project, invoking questions about the purpose of cultural and national flags as well as what lies between the lines of a coat of arms when applied to cultures which do not inherently embrace them.

In ‘Bloodsport’ we see a cross-continental thread formed between the postmodernist treatments of tradition in both Ireland and the USA. Through the portrayal of Digital Hardcore artist Julia Louise Knifefist (Ethan Soost), we see themes of plurality, physicality, and self-reflection. In ‘Kapok’ a range of interpersonal and internal experience of the Cantonese-Irish community are defined by symbolism, selfhood, and satellites. Within the piece we see the documentation of Chinese-Irish movement Artist Aiesha Wong, who serves as a catalyst of neoculture through body and visual language. In ‘Kobo’ the lens is placed upon that of the early 2000s to current experience of the Nigerian-Irish community through the medium of a self-employed taxi driver. The visual language consists of a dialect that borders man & machine, structured by the silhouette of the Lagos State flag yet capturing intimacy that a broader geographical symbol simply cannot.

Spirit, Samantha Brown

Spirit is a mixed media installation exploring the themes of the artist’s own personal history from Caribbean parentage through disjointed stories, fragments of the past, the historical telling of world history and its problematic lens of the enslavement trade.

Reincorporating her own family history into the landscape of the project using archival material, sowing nature into the fabric of these lost and past memories, using Irish native plants as a commentary on indigenous way of life and its medicinal properties. Spirit seeks to embody three notions entailing the spirit of the artist’s grandmother’s and her non relationship to them, to the spirit of those taken over the Middle Passage through the lens of the European retelling of history.

The spirit of plants which crossed over with people, ensuring their survival, into our current food culture. The okra seed was transported in the braids of the ancestors before crossing The Middle Passage, spreading globally into Caribbean, Creole, and Asian dishes. Yarrow is an indigenous plant found on roadsides and wasteland. Its spirit speaks through its healing properties and folklore. Achilles was said to use it on the battlefield for the wounded, no such luck for him. Seeds in hair or blown on a wind take root and thrive despite the conditions in which they find themselves. The same can be said of the ancestors whose spirit lives on in the DNA of our day to day existence.

Ara, Tobi Balogun

Ara – passageway to freedom is an interrogation of black masculinity through surrealism and sustainable methods. Theorising the body as a liminal space. A transitionary state that itself transitions through space both real and figurative. A Noah’s ark. Looking at black masculinity as something we build together, a sacred vessel shaped by community. What forms a man and in response how do we shape ourselves in parallel to our community on the journey? Using the concept of suspension within cultural ties as a core language Ara journeys through the artist’s experience both personal and cultural in expressing these nuances.