In the incisive words of Martiniquas writer Édouard Glissant, the archipelago is “diffracted, fractal, necessary in its totality, fragile or contingent in its unity, passing through and remaining, it is a state of the world.” So it is in the Royal Hibernian Academy of Arts’ (RHA) largest group photography exhibition ever staged, titled Archipelago. In what is described as a landmark moment for lens-based art in Ireland, the show is a product of the collaboration between RHA and artist-led group Island Photographers. Curated by Davey Moor, the exhibition was launched to much delight on September 12th and will be showing, having been recently extended by two months, until December 21st. Featuring 17 artists, eight of which are from Island Photographers, Archipelago creates something completely beyond the ordinary.
The crux of this seminal show was RHA inviting artists to “respond to the spatial magnitude of the largest gallery in Ireland”. With many of the artists responding in curious and mystical ways, one can expect to sail between in-the-round works, from wall to wall, to discover the unmethodical yet intentional splay of images. The labyrinthine layout of the room makes for a titillating sense of discovery. Immediately greeted by the vast ceilings of the gallery, one can expect to be first met with the strikingly beautiful portrait, Red by Darragh Soden, part of his series Ladies & Gentlemen. Looming hauntingly in the background, watching you as you traverse the show, is Conor Horgan’s towering, monochrome structure, EDGE. This work is a heavy-chested but necessary response to the shameful mess that was the construction of hostile architecture to prevent rough sleeping at Dublin’s Grand Canal in 2024. Laying unsuspectingly at the far end of the room is a series of photos that you couldn’t soon forget; Clodagh O’Leary’s Sublicks and Lackeens chronicles unseen aspects of the lives of Traveller children, such as the traditional gathering at horse fairs, where the adults do business and the kids come together to explore. It invites those watching to see them as just that – children. The series invokes such innocent traits that are present in all children, such as optimism, naïveté, and mischievousness. Their faces inspire something hopeful, particularly in the arresting portrait ‘Never be without your horse’, an image taken from a lower angle of a young boy holding a miniature horse in his arms as he looks beyond the lens, a stoic look across his face.
The works in Archipelago insist upon themselves in diffident yet abiding ways. The artists duly navigate through the prosaic, and mediate upon several aspects of life, nature, and Ireland–especially that of the country losing its welcoming spirit as of late. The play of light and shadow in works like EDGE evoke the austerity and grim reality that permeates the everyday, while works like Ladies & Gentlemen and Padraig Spillane’s 3D collage works, in all their impish, entrancing colours, confront you with an intimate vulnerability. Many of the images in the show possess a deliberate and imperfect simplicity. It is deeply human and refutes any kind of over-polishing that is often found in photography, and indeed regular Irish life. The artistic honesty and charmingly disparate style becomes the exhibition’s strength, and the result is a melancholic, revelatory sense of pride in what’s before you. One will feel all too familiar in this space yet not at all. Surrounding you are walls of recognisable cultural markers – a wall of fresh-footed turf, trees arching over a country road, soldiers sitting atop fences at borders. Yet everything is so new, bizarre, and wonderful, that your previously conceived idea of this culture you know so well is shaken up completely. As you move through, you begin to feel like you, yourself, are part of such an archipelago. Perhaps that’s the point.
Upon leaving Archipelago, many images may linger, but what ultimately stays with you is the sensation of all aspects of Ireland, nature, sexuality, art, borders, and poetics converging to form a whole, to form you. Art such as this offers a necessary mirror and is sure to leave many smatterings of internal guideposts for understanding the self and how it fits into a broader cultural context at the same time.
