EOGHAN RYAN
The Gallery | 13/04/2024 – 27/04/2024
Exhibition Run: 13 April – 27 April
Preview: 12 April 6pm – 8pm
Gallery Opening Hours: Monday – Friday 10am – 5pm, Saturday 12pm – 5pm
Saturday 27 April 10am – 2pm
Eoghan Ryan’s film installation A Sod State (2021), looks to conflicting themes of religion, statehood, state power, and spectatorship through the lens of the Northern Irish Troubles.
Shown for the first time in Ireland, the film unravels a world of untrustworthy narration, wandering sounds, strobing imagery, and disarray. It is a tale of a corrupted, often censored, surreal, and confused state of affairs, in which an inner demagogue is manifested. This creature, or puppet, is not quite god, not quite devil, and performs binary contradictions of class, faith, identity, and borders; private, public, and political.
A Sod State posits the Troubles in an alarmingly present tense, reconfigured as a time out of joint. Confusing memory and media, the film draws heavily from manipulated archival footage, juxtaposing it with images of recent post-Brexit media coverage. As such, it becomes an example of repetitive political theatre; a spectacle watched and consumed through TV screens and newspaper articles. Alongside the looping film, lies stacked piles of pallets. A pasted collage of images obliterate the white walls of the gallery. These images are enlarged and manipulated newspaper clippings, selected from the ongoing archive, sent to Ryan by his father every other week for the last fifteen years.
Q&A Saturday 20 April at 3pm
A conversation between Eoghan Ryan and Dr Rory Rowan, Trinity College Dublin will take place in the Complex Gallery.
The exhibition is accompanied by A Sod State – a publication featuring contributions from Maria Fusco, Jaki Irvine and Pádraic E. Moore.
This exhibition is the first in the series of projects, ‘The Ideas that Make Us’, curated by Więckiewicz-Carroll, that explore the impact of political and social structures on our identity.
Supported by the Arts Council of Ireland.