In the invitation to write this essay in response to Pallas Projects’ fourteenth Periodical Review, I’m told that it’s envisaged less as a write-up of the chosen artworks and more as a reflection of the writer’s current preoccupations. What are my preoccupations? I think: necessarily political. I think of the task assigned to the selecting panel, to capture the last year in art activity across the island; how deeply associative the framing could be for an audience.

In coming to write about the works that speak to me in this exhibition, I can only think of the stains on collective humanity – Gaza, Lebanon, Congo – that have continued, not just started, in the past twelve months. I scroll through the matrix of links forwarded to me over email (to artists’ websites, reviews, traces of the work selected for the exhibition), searching for an answer, a response, or a path towards one, at least.

In the list of works, I see a shared concern with the collective and its defining and identifying forces: there is Basil al-Rawi’s crowdsourced VR ethnography of the Iraqi diaspora; Sarah Long’s paintings using folklore to intervene in the masculine histories that disempower women. And so my interpretations land on what I continue to be preoccupied by, which is the collective’s latent power and fragile equilibrium.

As artists and writers and audiences, as people invested in a certain way of thinking and talking, it can be difficult to elaborate an earnest position. But in entering the worlds of these artworks, the thought of the people accompanies me. The potential of this thought tempts me out, and through.

***

So, who first is with the peopledem? Farouk858 (a.k.a. Farouk Alao) is. His billboard Bally (she sees Dublin) (2024), painted live on the facade of Project Arts Centre, foregrounds three digitally rendered faces side by side. Two smiling, one agape. Film documentation of the process sees Alao paint each face with the titular bally, or balaclava, a choice wrangling together different concerns: surveillance, fashion’s role in signalling anonymity and authenticity, and the evergreen question of Black representation in the visual field. The bally is rooted in the street cultures of Caribbean and African communities in the United Kingdom, specifically London; in the roadmen who wield immense cultural influence on this side of the Black Atlantic, whose ends are culturally twinned with ours. In what I think is a fascinating linguistic creep, this use of the word has made its way to the Black citizens of Ireland – like the artist, like me – where it is also a common prefix for Irish place names: Ballymun, Ballinasloe, Ballyjamesduff. The resonance deepens.

She sees Dublin; so she sees us too. The three-faced figure is as much a viewer as we are. She’s meeting us where we are, out on the streets. I’m reminded of Brian O’Doherty’s classic critiques of the white cube as the designated space of artistic encounter. The image of the gallery persists as ‘unshadowed, white, clean, artificial’, and its attendant artworks: ‘isolated from everything that would detract from its own evaluation of itself’. [1] Here I was, in the built environment, in public, with a library of interpretations drawn from my time with Bally. Would the billboard have struck me in the same way had I seen it inside Project’s exhibition space, literally named the ‘Cube’? How many others had slowed underneath the work to look up as I had – would they have been tempted indoors, out of the public and into private terms of engagement?

The public has long been the mixing bowl of culture and ideology and people, where the state keeps its tabs on you. Look up anywhere and you’ll find a CCTV camera looking back. Many take near-constant surveillance as an unfortunate product of modern life: something you put up with for the convenience of social participation on- and offline. Naomi Klein refers to it, more chillingly, as the ‘Faustian bargain of the digital age’. [2] Many others find this totally objectionable and might don a balaclava to seize what little anonymity is left to them. Though, the choice is increasingly not ours to make, an unfreedom solidified by the recent amendment to the Criminal Justice Act of 1994. The new legislation – approved in the wake of last November’s riots in Dublin and this summer’s reactionary violence across the UK – prohibits the balaclava and other face coverings at protests and, circumspectly described, where ‘a person is loitering in a manner giving rise to concerns for the safety of people or property’. [3] To me, it feels hysterical and misdirected, a move that only appears to tackle racist intimidation and threats to public safety, all while reinscribing state power.

I’m glad of the counter in Alao’s tripartite bally. In such a monitored environment, the work is a heel-turn away from the state’s eyes – a duck into the crowd.

***

And what of those gone from us already, and their mourners? Ceara Conway is with them, leis na daoine agus a bhrón. Her work, Grief Spell (2024) is a seven-minute live performance and film that indeed feels like an incantation. ‘Grief is a physical thing,’ Conway muses, over sombre instrumentation. The mood of the score matches the artist’s demeanour: she sits with knees drawn up, eyes closed, contemplative, thickly dusted with a grey-white powder that pours intermittently from above. The work emerges from a personal experience – ‘a great loss’ – and from an ongoing research interest in grief, this time anchored in the Norse tradition of ‘cinderbiters’: people who exempted themselves from the life of the household to lie on the hearth and scoop its ashes. The tradition runs parallel to another: that of keening, lamentations sung for the dead in Gaelic rites; both make space for a depth of sorrow otherwise inexpressible in ordinary words. And yes, Conway’s mournful vocal leaps resemble the reedy sounds of keening, no doubt an influence. The minimal choreography makes for a film that is more like a scored and performed photograph, only sometimes interrupted by the falling ashes, which settle eventually, finding a home in the artist’s hair and on her limbs, and in gentle piles at her feet. Stillness abounds here. This is an invitation to stop and consider our own and others’ suffering, of which there is so much, she narrates.

As I replay Grief Spell, images of mass death from around the world swirl around my head, gutting me completely. It’s October 2024, or summer 2020; or sometime in the last half-decade of devastation. It’s hard to sit and contemplate the product of a human mind without thinking of the ones so violently and unjustly ripped from us. How many spells are lost forever?

Death is always on the horizon but for most of us the horizon is far away and appears fixed in its farawayness. As living beings, we keep our attention here, in the fore, in the world of other living beings. In his readings of photographic practices after the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster, art historian Teju Cole pointedly lays out this shortsightedness. It’s hard for humans to project their own end, to ‘imagine that this could be you, that you are the one suddenly bereft of a solid place in the world’ [4]. We too could be cinderbiters or perhaps already have been: grief will touch us at one time or another. Conway’s performance feels like an acceptance of this fact, like a quiet nod. Death can be peaceful and right if we let it.

***

And what of where the people live and die? Yuri Pattison is there. His dream sequence (2024) – the artist’s site-specific contribution to Longest Way Round, Shortest Way Home, an ambitious off-site programme by Temple Bar Gallery + Studios – is installed in the formerly disused Pump House No. 2, in the graving docks of Dublin Port. New information technologies slot into the defunct industrial environment of the building, to make an account of water’s role in industry and imagination alike.

At the centre of the installation is a large-scale video generated in game design software, glowing out dreamlike images of a fictional river’s course. Footage of real rivers like the Liffey, Thames, and Jordan compose the invented body of water, and we are brought along in its digital currents from source to mouth. The video’s score comes courtesy of a MIDI-controlled player piano plucking out notes in minor key. In the adjoining room is something much more tangible: a miniature model of a coastal landscape with tiny shrubbery, an eroded shoreline and the ruins of anonymous buildings. Sensors in the Pump House and elsewhere in the port monitor air and water quality, translating them into data that shifts the model’s water level up or down. At one point in my visit, it’s just the invigilator and me in the installation. I’m acutely aware of the draw of our breaths, of our implication in the sparing or flooding of the landscape. What Pattison has done here is articulate the ‘infrathick’: the huge scale of human action on the planet that’s invisible to us in daily life but deeply consequential. These unseen industries range from domestic waste disposal to fossil fuel extraction, and, indeed, maritime logistics. In contrast to Marcel Duchamp’s notion of the ‘infrathin’ – that is, the slight, the barely there – the infrathick makes up massive processes, ‘phenomena that evade perception because they are too vast, too great in scale’, write scholars Brad Haylock and Paul James. [5] Without being didactic or ham-fisted, as work about the climate crisis so often can be, the artist leads us into an honest look at our damaging relationship with our only home.

For the first time since its construction in the 1950s, Pump House No. 2 has been opened to the public. Its name was its function: a place to contain, control, and circulate the water that powered the construction, maintenance, and repairs of ships. The machinery needed for this must have been nothing short of an engineering miracle then; walking through the Pump House now, I’m struck by its heavy wrought-iron drums and pumps, and walls of blinkers, knobs, and dials, which are now useless. It’s as if the scale of this machinery matched a faith in the triumph of human industry, a faith we now know to be a major cause of ecological overshoot.

Water and its attendant functions in the natural world are at work twice in dream sequence; as rich symbology and as uncompromising mirror of our time.

***

The works in this Periodical Review, placed beside one another, reflect a moment of cultural and political intensity. How should we carry the force of this moment forward? The path leads me to two places. First, Audre Lorde’s 1977 talk, an exhortation to ‘teach by living and speaking those truths which we believe and know beyond understanding’ [6]. Second, the focus of Erica Scourti’s editorial process for the eleventh issue of the art-writing publication The Happy Hypocrite: ‘forms of sociality that spring up in-between, that push back against crises, that fight, dance, celebrate and laugh in shifting collectivities’ [7]. And so it stands to reason: if we’re to meet the planetary challenges of the next century, we need a new language to shout in, a true way of being that calls the world we need into the here and now.

Notes

[1] Brian O’Doherty, ‘Notes on the Gallery Space’, in Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery Space (San Francisco: Lapis Press, 1976), 14–15.

[2] Naomi Klein, Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World (London: Penguin, 2023).

[3] Jane Moore, ‘Legislation Allowing Gardaí to Direct People to Remove Face Coverings at Protests Is Approved’, The Journal, 15 October 2024, https://www.thejournal.ie/legislation-gardai-direct-remove-face-covering-protest-approved-6516097-Oct2024/.

[4] Teju Cole, ‘Pictures in the Aftermath’, in Black Paper: Writing in a Dark Time (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021), 93.

[5] Paul James and Brad Haylock, ‘Art in the Anthropocene: Apprehending Abstracted Crises, Thickly’, in Art Writing in Crisis, ed. Brad Haylock and Megan Patty (London: Sternberg Press, 2021), 36.

[6] Audre Lorde, ‘The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action’, in Sister Outsider (Berkeley: The Crossing Press, 1984), 43.

[7] Erica Scourti, ‘Editorial’, in The Happy Hypocrite: Silver Bandage, ed. Maria Fusco (London: Book Works, 2019): 5.

Diana Bamimeke is an independent curator, art writer, and transdisciplinary artist based in Dublin, Ireland.

This essay was commissioned by Pallas Projects and PVA, as part of the ‘PPS/PVA Visual Art Writing Commission’. It was written (and originally printed) to accompany Pallas’s Periodical Review 14, 6 December 2024–25 January 2025.