The Douglas Hyde Gallery saw the opening of two fantastic exhibitions this week. Galleries one and two will play host to the manifestations borne of the beautiful minds of Abbas Akhavan and Mona Hatoum.
Akhavan, an Iranian-born, Toronto-based artist, explores the domestic sphere in his Variations on a Garden. Relentless in his practice of mediums, the exhibition comprises solely of sculpture, video and photographic works and is the artist’s first solo exhibition to arrive in Ireland. If you’ll pardon my poorly made pun, the exhibition itself is no walk in the park. His “Flora of Iraq” is a litany of bursting emotions which amounts to a lingering of nothingness. Bronze, charred and cast, it is suggestive of both flora and shrapnel. The obstruction of culture and identity at the hands of war and cruelty seems to be the basic theme of the piece. The scale of the work is almost proportional to the average-sized human male, a reminder of how tiny, dispensable and fragile we are. Mere petal-skinned creatures against the wrath of hate, destruction and pain – we won’t survive.
In accordance with the Douglas Hyde Gallery’s new series of solo-invited exhibitions, ‘the artist’s eye’, which asks artists exhibiting in gallery one to invite an artist of noteworthy influence to present in gallery two. Akhavan has invited the brilliant Mona Hatoum to exhibit her 1985 film Roadworks. The film is laden with cultural references and follows the artist as she walks barefoot with a pair of Dr Martens boots laced around her ankles, through the South London area of Brixton. Hatoum, born in Beirut to a Palestinian family, studied and resided in London. In the video, she notes that it is completely improvised and completed so she could “vent her anger”. This impromptu theme exacerbates her already obvious distress so that emotions jump from screen to room, suffocating the space with emotions which are not your own but which you are stimulated to feel. My praise for the artist is unlimited. Hatoum is a key figure in the 21st century art scene and one to keep an eye on.
The exhibition runs until 13th January 2018.
