The Artlink 'New Art Award' Show

15th July – 11th August
Fort Dunree, Buncrana
Opening Hours: Thursday - Saturday 2pm - 5pm

Ursula Burke: State of Grace

As Irish citizens, visitors or members or the global Irish community, we share a conceptual map that allows us instant access to images of Ireland. Round Towers, Heritage sites, Celtic Crosses, Guinness, Riverdance, pastoral landscapes filled with an abundance of cows and sheep and so fourth are all routinely deployed as emblematic of an Irish experience, an Irish image.Contemporary images of Ireland, however are characterized by rising immigration levels, a floundering economy and the realization of the self, no longer through Catholicism, but through consumer choices. Ireland has become global. Furthermore, in an era where Ireland is witness to a variety of racial confections and national borders are increasingly made more fluid, does this make Irish cultural characteristics and heritage seem more or less important? The work contained within this exhibition attempts to destabilize representations of Irish cultural authenticity, viewed in contemporary terms. The promiscuous nature of meaning ascribed within any single or series of representations of or about contemporary Ireland has the subversive potential to activate, demystify or debunk our understanding of what it means or looks like or to be Irish in the twenty first century.

Sam Keogh: Babel

Acts of profanation, according to philosopher Giorgio Agamben, are a means to return what is sacred (and thus separated from man, through sacrifice) back to the use of man. This idea goes some way toward contextualising the artist Sam Keogh’s use of materials to make sacred objects which declare falseness and preciousness simultaneously. In playing with history, myth and forgery with impoverished material Keogh is playing with the mechanics of aura, power and ‘historicity’ manifest in material objects.

For this exhibition, Keogh focuses on Christian motifs and iconography. This subject matter is expropriated and subtly directed toward different ends – away from the realm of the sacred and toward a more immanent politics of value, representation and revolt.

Jim Ricks: 14th January 2009 (We will say it has nothing to do with us)

"Yes, Israelis deserve security. Twenty Israelis dead in 10 years around Gaza is a grim figure indeed. But 600 Palestinians dead in just over a week, thousands over the years since 1948 – when the Israeli massacre at Deir Yassin helped to kick-start the flight of Palestinians from that part of Palestine that was to become Israel – is on a quite different scale. This recalls not a normal Middle East bloodletting but an atrocity on the level of the Balkan wars of the 1990s. And of course, when an Arab bestirs himself with unrestrained fury and takes out his incendiary, blind anger on the West, we will say it has nothing to do with us. Why do they hate us, we will ask? But let us not say we do not know the answer." – Robert Fisk

Jim Ricks uses a collection of Associated Press images dated from 14th January 2009, the time of Israel's invasion of Gaza, as the starting point for this exhibition.  The work negotiates an uncomfortable compromise between the provincial spheres of fashion and High Street vis-a-vis the daily reality of Palestinians living in Gaza.

The work re-creates fragments from news photographs as sculptural objects and uses this process of re-fabricating as a vehicle for exploring the one of the most urgent political issues of our time, as well as to investigate the role of documentary photography in an age of consumerism, de-sensitisation and cultural tourism.