Details
9 August - 27 October 2024
Upper Gallery: The Shake: Khaled Barakeh
Tall & Sunken Gallery: The Weight of Light: Pascale Steven & Conor McFeely
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The Shake: Khaled Barakeh
The Shake is an ambitious art project by Khaled Barakeh, a Syrian multidisciplinary conceptual artist, activist, and cultural manager.
The project takes its stepping-off point from Maurice Harron's iconic public sculpture, Hands across the Divide, symbolising the division between Catholic and Protestant in the doubly named City of Derry-Londonderry, marked by its complex identities in Northern Ireland.
Erected in 1992, Harron's sculpture symbolises conciliation between both sides of the political divide during The Troubles. Barakeh reimagines this historical marker, focusing on the hands of the monument's two figures and precisely the gap between them: cast in bronze, frozen in an unfinished reconciliation, almost meeting but never genuinely joining. Though it is a gap brimming with emotional, historical, and political differences, Khaled, as an artist in exile unable to return to Syria, is interested in exploring the possibilities within that emptiness and how it can serve as a bridge between communities, histories, and ideologies.
The project examines the relationship between public and interior space and questions the role of public sculptures as historical markers in spaces with contested histories. It aims to broaden efforts to equitable civic participation and create more inclusive societies, particularly for communities that have been marginalised or disenfranchised due to race, ethnicity, gender, or other affiliations. Read more here.
The Weight of Light: Conor McFeely and Pascale Steven
This exhibition brings together the practices of Conor McFeely and Pascale Steven, artists who live together and occasionally work together, their practices have been influenced by their shared, and occasionally different outlooks on art and living.
In this presentation works overlap at a conceptual level, with their focus being the discernment of meaning within the experience of loss and the potential for adaptive change resulting from life experience.
Their partnership is a synergy of emotions and ideas and an invitation for viewers to explore and make connections within the collaboration.
Conor McFeely will present the video work Memorial Device in the Sunken Gallery along with new works, photography and installation under the title Azimuth PointZero in the Tall Gallery.
Pascale Steven will be showing the works Coda and Gravity Game in the Tall Gallery. They are provisional by their nature in terms of their presentation and are specifically considered for this gallery space.
The project reflects the artists wider interest in the use of materials and images as metaphors. The works are connected by their shared interest in serendipity when integrating sometimes incongruous processes and images.
