Author Archives: SummerhallTV

Caroline Pi : Shrine for girls

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June 16 – August 20 2017
The LAB Gallery, Dublin

The LAB Gallery is pleased to present, Shrine For Girls, Dublin, the first solo exhibition in Ireland of New York artist Patricia Croinin. One of the critically acclaimed highlights of the 2015 Venice Biennale, this site-specific installation is a meditation on the global plight of exploited girls and women.

Moving from the sacred altars and architecture of Venice’s sixteenth-century Chiesa di San Gallo to the secular urban gallery context of The LAB, in the heart of Joyce’s Nighttown and built in the shadow of the last Magdalene Laundry to close in Ireland in 1996, Cronin gathers hundreds of articles of women’s and girls’ clothing from around the world to represent three specific tragedies. Brightly-colored saris symbolize two Indian cousins who were gang-raped and lynched in 2014; somber hijabs signify 276 Nigerian Chibok schoolgirls who were kidnapped by the terrorist group Boko Haram in 2014 (109 of which are still missing); and pale aprons symbolize those worn by “fallen women” in forced labour at the Magdalene Asylums and Laundries in Ireland, the United Kingdom, Europe and the United States to act as relics of these young martyrs.

Shrines, part of every major religion’s practice, provide a space for contemplation, petition and rituals of remembrance. In this exhibition, Cronin presents the three original fabric sculptures, here piled on top of their shipping crates to also address human trafficking and act as a metaphor of who or what is valued in our culture. Returning to the neighbourhood where the weight of history inevitably overlays the interpretation of the contemporary, in the historic Monto, Cronin reminds us that we are all complicit in allowing violent abuses of women’s rights to become invisible in our society. The histories of the Magdalene Laundries are only starting to be heard.

Small photographs of each tragedy accompany the sculpture and a new series of oil portrait paintings, exhibitied for the first time, place a human face on tragedy and draw our attention away from statistics to the magnitude of the individual loss and unrealized human potential.

Cronin asks: “What is the role of contemporary art in our 24-hour news cycle society? What can an artist do if they are not a politician, an NGO nor a philanthropist? Hopefully the artist looks out, keenly observes the world, reflects, and responds in a way that shakes us out of our numbness. We cannot be silent.”

Chien-Han Hung : Ever Never

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Dates: 2nd to the 27th of August

Venue: Cairns Lecture Theatre, Summerhall

Ever Never is a semi-autobiographical story with its roots in the personal journey of Co-coism director Hung Chien-han. Deeply affected by her father’s death and living away from home, on her travels she found the aircraft cabin a mysterious space where the past could be intercepted, where fragments of forgotten memories were rekindled and brought to life. Also drawing on the experiences of playwright Feng Chi-chun and the rest of the creative team, in Ever Never the airport and aeroplane become places out of time where past and present collide in a delicate and heartfelt physical theatre piece.

Co-Coism is a young Taiwanese theatre company with a focus on cooperatively devised theatre.

Winner of the theatre play competition, WuZhen theatre festival 2015

Glen Neath : Séance

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Dates: 2nd to the 26th of August

Venue: The Terrace

Glen Neath and David Rosenberg’s new project, Séance, builds on the success of their previous shows, Ring and Fiction. But this time it takes place inside a completely dark shipping container. Séance explores the psychology of a group of people who have been bombarded with suggestible material. It is an intense sonic performance for twenty people at a time, lasting for twenty terrifying minutes.

Please note: the show takes place inside a pitch dark shipping container.

Claire O’Reilly : LOVE+

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Dates: 2nd to the 24th

Venue: Red Lecture Theatre

What happens to romance when there’s a machine who cooks for you, cleans for you, never forgets your birthday or how you like your tea, tells you you’re beautiful, holds you when you’re crying, and still makes you come? LOVE+ is a one-woman two-hander about the inevitability of human/robot relationships. It’s about loving, being loved, being human, and whether those things are intertwined. It’s not about whether or not you can love machines, because we all already do. It’s about what it’ll be like when they love us back.

#LOVEplus alternates in rep with MALAPROP’s BlackCatfishMusketeer.

Catherine Paskell : Sugar Baby

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Dates: 4th to the 27th of August

Venue: Roundabout

Being a small-time drug dealer in Cardiff and living up to your family’s expectations is tough. Marc avoids his mum, disguises his cannabis plants with fake tomatoes at the allotment, and now has to bail his old man out of £6,000 owed to local loan shark Oggy. When he meets Lisa for the first time in years, things get even messier. Oggy wants Lisa. Lisa wants Marc. Marc wants to survive the day.

A one-man comedy from critically-acclaimed writer Alan Harris (Paines Plough, National Theatre Wales) and award-winning Welsh company Dirty Protest.

Naomi O’Nolan : Jack B Yeats and Paul Henry, Contrasting Visions of Ireland

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2 June to 30 September 2017
The Hunt Museum, The Custom House, Rutland Street, Limerick

This summer we are featuring two of Ireland’s most important 20th century artists, Jack B. Yeats + Paul Henry, in the exhibition Contrasting Visions of Ireland from June to September. Billed to be an exhibition of both national and international significance and will feature 50 works, many of which are not usually on public display. This brings together a collection drawn from private and public collections including works from the European Investment Bank Collection in Luxembourg.

Claire O’Reilly : BlackCatfishMusketeer

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Dates: 4th to the 27th of August

Venue: Red Lecture Theatre

You meet someone online. All you know is their name and that they seem to like you as much as you like them. In fact, you think you love each other. But do you? Can you? What is love, anyway? BlackCatfishMusketeer is a three-hander in which one actor plays the internet. It’s about trust, doubt, closeness at a distance, and being worried you’ll die alone and cats will eat you. #BlackCatfish alternates in rep with MALAPROP’s LOVE+.

Una McDade & Lesley Wilson : WIRED

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Dates: 23rd to the 26th of August

Venue: Army @ The Fringe, Army Reserve Centre, 89 East Claremont St

‘They said I’d be good at it.’ The story of a young woman soldier’s journey through post-traumatic stress by award-winning playwright Lesley Wilson, developed in collaboration with the British Army. Following training, Joanna is deployed to Afghanistan and believes she is prepared for what lies ahead. What she is not prepared for is a visit from her past. As the realities of war close in around her, Joanna struggles to make sense of the voices, memories and flashbacks that wage war inside her head. Originally developed with support from Playwrights’ Studio Scotland and Tron Theatre Creative.

Luca Silvestrini : Border Tales

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Dates: 4th to the 26th of August

Venue: Main Hall, Summerhall

Protein presents a thought-provoking yet poignant commentary on multicultural Britain through dance, live music and dialogue compiled from the performers’ personal experiences. Border Tales looks at post-Brexit Britain through the eyes of an international cast and gazes satirically on stereotypical thinking about migrant outsiders and bigoted homelanders.

Commissioned by Bath Dance, ICIA Bath, DanceEast, DanceXchange, Dance Manchester and The Place.

Léonie Higgins, Sara Cocker & Lowri Evans : Eggs Collective Get Around

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Dates: 2nd to the 27th of August

Venue: Cairns Lecture Theatre

Pinned on the arse-end of a night out, Get A Round is a show with lipstick on its teeth and Wotsits on its face. A wayward exploration of friendship, kindness and belonging that spills out towards its audience. In a world that’s going to the dogs, Eggs Collective wonder if the basic principles of a good night out might make the world a better place. Smart and energetic, entertaining and political, this is a piece of theatre that warms hearts and reeks of Blossom Hill. Coming soon to BBC television’s Performance Live strand – catch it live at Summerhall!

Commissioned by Contact. Developed with public funding by the National Lottery through Arts Council England.

Helen Gaynor : And Creatures Dream a New Language

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3 July to 25 August
Wexford Arts Centre and Wexford County Council Buildings

The Arts Department of Wexford County Council in partnership with Wexford Arts Centre are delighted to present And Creatures Dream…A New Language, a group exhibition which reveals in part how the visual arts are represented in County Wexford, with focus in this exhibition, on painting. The selected artists involved actively engage with the language of paint, wholeheartedly referencing its distinguished history, while making adventurous forays beyond.

The artists included in the exhibition are Robert Armstrong, David Begley, John Busher, Ciaran Bowen, Eamonn Carter, Serena Caulfield, Helen Gaynor, Aileen Murphy, Kate Murphy, Rosie O’Gorman, Breda Stacey, Emma Roche, George Warren and Michael Warren.

Étienne Lepage & Frederick Gravel : Thus Spoke

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Dates: 2nd to the 27th of August

Venue: King’s Hall, Main Space

Thus Spoke… is an electrifying piece of existential pop from two of Montreal’s most celebrated artists. Playfully challenging the status quo, writer, Étienne Lepage and choreographer, Frédérick Gravel defy convention in this irresistible antidote to apathy. From Nietzsche to Hendrix, Thus Spoke… shifts from scathing diatribe to rock and roll polemic in the most philosophically charming show you’ll see at the Fringe.

Tom Barnes : The Last Resort

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Dates: 2nd to the 27th of August

Venue: The Machine Shop

A menacing fiction, made entirely of unimaginable fact, from the creators of The Litvinenko Project and Ventoux, seen at Summerhall in 2015. Last Resort is the alternative future for Guantanamo Bay. You’ll sit in a deckchair, you’ll get a rum cocktail on arrival and you’ll feel the sand between your toes. Performed in a secret enclave in the Summerhall basement, 2Magpies Theatre will take you through the tropical haze on a unique multi-sensory package holiday. This is an extraordinary rendition and it is all-inclusive.

Lisa Byrne : Kustom Kulture

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24 June to 11 August
The Presentation Centre
Convent Road,Enniscorthy, Co.Wexford

This unique exhibition of Kustom Kulture artwork is a prime example of blurring creative boundaries. Ger utilises unusual objects and creates fantastic one off pieces based on a niche market with roots in American Rock and Roll. The Official Open night will feature a host of all things kustom including cars and bikes along with Ger’s original artwork.

Tessa Bide : A Strange New Space

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Dates: 2nd to the 27th of August

Venue: Cairns Lecture Theatre

Amira is obsessed with space and dreams of becoming an Astronaut. One night, the bangs, whooshes and fizzes of her imagination explode out of her dreams, becoming a deafening reality. Amira has to pack her bag for the intergalactic trip that she’s been waiting for… A Strange New Space is an imaginary voyage into space, paralleled with Amira’s real-life journey as a refugee. A new non-verbal, physical show for the whole family using puppetry and original music, from the maker of Summerhall Festival 2015 hit ‘The Tap Dancing Mermaid’ (★★★★ The List).

Louise Orwin : A GIrl & A Gun

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Dates: 2nd to the 27th of August

Venue: Anatomy Lecture Theatre

“All you need to make a movie is a girl and a gun” (Jean Luc Godard). This is a show about girls and guns. It’s a show that asks a woman and an unprepared male performer to take to the stage and play out a film script in front of you. It wonders what the difference might be in watching something on screen and experiencing something live. It is a show that asks what it means to be a hero, what it means to be a plot device, and what it means to watch.

Úna McCarthy : Who put Bella in the wych elm

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30 June to 27 August

Isabella Walsh at Limerick City Gallery
Carnegie Building, Pery Square, Limerick

Who put Bella in the wych elm?” is a true story, a murder-mystery involving an unidentified female skeleton found inside a hollow tree in Hagely Wood, Worcestershire 1943. It is a complex tale of murder, mystery and intrigue.

This book acts as a metaphor for the whole story – there is a brief period where the truth may be gleaned before the information degrades. Events leave marks and traces of their occurrence. Although the actual details can fade and disappear quite quickly, some elements are long lasting. The story may seem completely changed and outwardly bear little or no obvious relation to the event, but would not exist without the original circumstance.

Amy Conway’s Super Awesome World

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Dates: 2nd to the 27th of August

Venue: Red Lecture Theatre

Join Amy on a videogame adventure like no other. Battle the minions of fear, loneliness and despair using your collective powers of human connection and emotional resilience. Only together can we slay the Darkness! Become Amy’s allies in an interactive experience that asks difficult questions and quests for elusive sparks of joy in the deep dark multi-user dungeons of the soul. Super Awesome World explores, through the prism of gaming, what depression is like and what it is like to fight it.

Winner of the Autopsy Award

Joanne Ryan : Eggsistentialism

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Dates: 2nd to the 27th of August

Venue: Red Lecture Theatre

Looking down the barrel of her final fertile years, one modern Irish woman goes on a comical quest to uncover the ifs, hows and crucially the whys of reproducing her genes. Eggistentialism tells us the story of her consultations with family, fertility experts, fortune tellers, philosophers, daytime radio and the dark recesses of the internet.

Enkidu Khaled : Working Method

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Dates: 4th to the 13th of August

Venue: Upper Church

Can art really save the world? For Belgian-Iraqi theatre-maker and performer Enkidu Khaled, living through the Iraq war, this became an urgent question. His award-winning show is a unique form of creative interaction. He invites his audience to join him in analysing and simplifying the complex process of making theatre through artistic expression and reflection. In a four-step plan, Khaled works with his audience to create a new performance every night, showing how memory, association and tiny fragments of ideas can become a story.

Photo Credits: Bas de Brouwer & Jolien Fagard

Laurence Dauphinais & Maxime Carbonneau : SIRI

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Dates: 2nd to the 27th of August

Venue: Main Space Kings Hall

With a performer on stage and iPhone’s personal assistant, Siri, her only partner, director Maxime Carbonneau and performer Laurence Dauphinais invent a theatre where chance reigns. Dauphinais, one of the first people in Canada created by artificial insemination, quests for her origins using the most famous artificial intelligence as her guide. Through a precise game of question and answer, Dauphinais exposes the bizarre metaphysical dimension of the machine, while blurring the limitations that separate them. Siri is a terrifyingly clever pilgrimage into the mysteries of our own programming.

Alexander Devriendt & Angelo Tijssens: £¥€$

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Dates: 4th to the 27th of August

Venue: Upper Church Theatre

‘The best way to rob a bank, is to own one’ (William Crawford, Commissioner of the California Department of Savings and Loans). Ontroerend Goed invites you to get under the skin of the well-to-do, the 1%, the super rich, the ones who pull the strings, the faces we never get to see. For one night, you can take their chairs. You call the shots. You’re in the centre of our economic system. You shape the course. And who knows, you might make the world a better place, more fair, more responsible because you’ll do things differently, for sure.

Úna McCarthy : The Space Between

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30 June to 27 August
Limerick City Gallery
Carnegie Building, Pery Square, Limerick

The Space Between brings together large scale Open paintings derived from observation in mediation of the other, a monumental work – “a self portrayed as process”; Who Goes There.

Comprising of a grid of 200 A4 images on sandpaper and a series of paintings on paper which are rooted in post “austerity” West of Ireland. Doris’ studio based practice and public art works are informed by and interest in consciousness, in the relational field that connects us and in how the self is constructed relationally. This is the animating field of the space between things.

The Open Paintings invite us to attune to the stillness of Being as subtle and open. The sandpaper and landscape works evoke systems – self and societal – that are ambiguous. They may be disintegrating or in the flux of moving to a higher level of organisation. It is this being present to the complex ambiguity of relational experience that open up the still field of presence.

Delme Thomas & Rachel Briscoe : Lists for The End of the World

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Dates: 2nd to the 27th of August

Venue: Cairns Lecture Theatre

Things I pretend to be interested in.
Times my 8 year old self would be proud of me.
Places I would hide a body.

This is a show composed entirely of crowd-sourced lists, from all kinds of people in all kinds of places – including from you the audience as you queue up to take your seats. In Lists…, the ordinary and the extraordinary, the profound and the ridiculous sit playfully side by side. Includes: laughs, music, sadtimes, romance, some dancing, a look at the world through other people’s eyes, fish sticks.

Winner of the 2016 Live Lab Empty Space Bursary, and co-commissioned by ARC Stockton.

(Image Credits: Chris Auld)

Philippos Phillipou, Dylan Read & Vangelis Makriyannakis : Ubu Roi

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Venue: Demonstration Room

Dates: 2nd to the 27th of August

Stagger me sideways! King Ubu, usurper to the throne of Baloney, carries a mop instead of a sceptre and dreams of his ‘Pâté de dog’. Meanwhile, he liquidates enemies and friends. Under his reign citizens face unbearable taxation and crippling whimsy, until someone calls for revolution… Alfred Jarry’s Ubu Roi is an absurd comedy which caused riots and launched the European avant-garde. Ludens Ensemble transform Ubu into a big old bash for four performers, interactive videos, a live DJ, puppetry, shadow-play and object manipulation.
Supported by the Cyprus High Commission.

Jeremy Waller, Aryo Khakpour & Milton Lim : Foreign Radical

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Dates: 2nd to the 27th of August

Venue: King’s Hall, Main Space

30 participants are invited into an intriguing theatrical game exploring security, profiling, privacy and freedom of expression in the age of cybersurveillance. Mobile throughout the performance, the participants collaborate, compete, investigate, debate and spy on each other. Depending on personal and group responses, participants witness different perspectives on the action, gathering evidence from dramatic scenes and documentary media that colour their views and how they play the game.

Tara Beagan & Andy Moro : Declaration

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Dates: 7th to the 25th of August

Venue: King’s Hall Backspace

An interdisciplinary work from Turtle Island that takes shape around peoples and the land. Indigenous artists of Canada invite reputed artists of othered communities to collaborate in artful protest and celebrate the right to do so. Article 11 has played in the Dominion of Canada under freeways, in museums and in major municipal headquarters. With Rematriation they declare personal and political sovereignty through dance, image, word and song on the Great White Mother’s home soil. Rematriation is also an active, evolving, installation work.

Úna McCarthy : Strange Attractors

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30 June to 27 August
Limerick City Gallery
Carnegie Building, Pery Square, Limerick

Touring exhibition by Irish artist Ronnie Hughes, one of Ireland’s most dynamic abstract painters, Hughe’s elegant and poised works are executed with complex technical skill, yet retain a lightness of touch. While his finished paintings display a diversity of styles, at heart they share common concern with the lived experienced, and what Hughes has described as “the beauty, the fragility and the violence of being.”

The exhibition was organised and toured by The Model, home of The Niland Collection, Sligo and after its exhibit at Limerick City Gallery of Art will tour to the Royal Hibernian Academy, Dublin.

The exhibition will be accompanied by a full-colour publication.
The project has been generously supported through the Arts Council Touring and Dissemination of Work Scheme.

Amy Nostbakken & Norah Sadava : Mouthpiece

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Dates: 3rd to the 27th of August

Venue: Kings Hall, Main Space

After numerous North American tours, the critically acclaimed, multi award-winning Mouthpiece makes its UK premiere. Mouthpiece follows one woman, for one day, as she tries to find her voice. Two performers express the inner conflict that exists within a modern woman’s head: the push and the pull, the past and the present, the progress and the regression. Interweaving a cappella harmony, dissonance, text and physicality, Mouthpiece is a harrowing, humorous, and heart-wrenching journey into the female psyche.

Jane Frere : #ProtestMaskProject

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Dates: 2nd August to the 24th September 2017

Venue: Anatomy Lecture Theatre Foyer

CAT (Creative, Aesthetic,Transgression) started life several years ago as a social media project.

The CAT mask became an emblem of protest spread via social media in 2014. CAT masks, handmade by artist, were adopted by “owners” who travelled the world posting selfies on Facebook and Twitter #proTestbed. ! Originally conceived as a protest against the threat to demolish the maverick architect Will Alsop’s arts venue, Testbed1, in London’s Battersea, the CAT defiantly took on new themes and personae first appearing on an interactive blackboard in The Doodle Bar @Testbed1. The artist’s protest highlighting Bahrain’s oppression of opposition groups received international TV coverage. ! Responding to public demand, Jane Frere created her own protest blackboard in her Highland studio, drawing on darker issues from the blitzing of Gaza in 2014 and the Scottish referendum, to messages smuggled from jailed human rights activists in Bahrain. The artist’s latest response reflects the world’s rude awakening to the rise of altRight, anti-immigrant bigotry, BREXIT and TRUMP. In solidarity with the “Pussyhat Project” for the Women’s march in Washington, Jane’s proTestbed CAT has turned pink with rage.

Jane Frere’s first major international installation, ‘Return of the Soul’, received five star reviews at the Edinburgh Art Festival in 2008. She exhibited ‘Into The Void“ a series of paintings, photographs and printmaking drawn from her experience of living behind the Israeli apartheid wall and in Palestinian refugee camps across the region at Summerhall in 2013. Recently focusing on printmaking, her work, in collaboration with Will Alsop RA, are exhibited at the Royal Academy in London.