New Irish Works 2026
International Centre for the Image, Dublin
★★★☆☆
With its origins in Photo Ireland’s 2013 festival of photography, New Irish Works, a triennial support programme for Irish lens-based practitioners, is now in its fifth iteration. This group show features the work of 10 artists, selected by jury from an open call, presented in the moody, subterranean confines of the International Centre for the Image.
It’s an atmosphere that seems to suit most of the works on show. There is little here in the way of grand statement or virtuoso technical ability. Faith in Henri Cartier-Bresson’s notion of the “decisive moment” has been sidelined by more complex considerations of photography as an ever-partial endeavour, the means of production for an endless stream of imagery whose sense might be gleaned only in the aggregate, through combination or juxtaposition.
Miriam O’Connor’s Fox=Cow presents of series of night-time shots taken using a wildlife camera. Images are frequently decentred in frames and presented with text that reveals the work to be part of a larger balancing act between the competing concerns of art, life and family.
In both Age Is a Privilege Unless You Forget!, by Debbie Castro, and Baghdad Down, by Kate and Peter Nolan, family archives are mined to consider the relationship between image and memories and to explore how the past bleeds into the present.
READ MORE
Family photos are presented as fragments from an ongoing process of loss and recall or, for Castro, as an opportunity to engage with that past symbolically, through augmentation and application of colour-coded stickers to the imagery.
Austin Hearne likewise grapples with the significance of the archive, in this case his own. In Slabs, multiple images are arranged without discernible order on folding tables. The resulting plethora is a microcosm of both the artist’s dilemma around selection and the proliferation of imagery generated and shared through social media.
Garry Loughlin and Mandy O’Neill both offer project-based works that focus on the politics of space and place, with the former examining the contested status of Rockall island and the latter focused on housing and planning in Dublin 7. O’Neill’s imagery is accompanied by audio, diaristic accounts and transcribed conversation to flesh out a living history of the aspirations and failures of social planning; Loughlin combines and layers his maritime imagery in a manner by turns suggestive and inscrutable.
Inspired by the story of Antonin Artaud’s trip to Inis Mór in 1937, Billy Kenrick presents probably the most conventional grouping of photographs in the exhibition, with a series of island detail shots taken using analogue cameras and presented primarily in black and white, with a handful in washed-out Polaroid colour tones.
Dorje de Burgh’s Now Is the Time takes the most overtly political stance of the exhibition, with a Wolfgang Tillmans-style presentation documenting facets of protest and state response. Faces of protesters are obscured, and imagery in a variety of sizes, styles and formats is dotted around the walls as if to emphasise not so much what is seen as what cannot be seen.
Sharing this concern with the visible and the invisible is a set of staged photographs by Emily O’Connell that narrate her grandmother’s escape from a mother-and-baby home in 1964. Visibility and the male gaze are also interrogated by Ciara Richardson in her series of physical augmentation of photographs documenting classical figurative sculptures.
Much of the work is thought provoking, and all of it is presented exceptionally well in the exhibition space, but the multifaceted, complex weave that most of the artists favour might be better served by the breathing space that comes from solo rather than group presentation.
New Irish Works 2026 is at the International Centre for the Image, in Dublin, until Sunday, August 9th
