As part of the FAMILY LINES PROJECT, The Douglas Hyde is delighted to introduce the first of a Billboard Series displaying artworks by Alice Rekab. From 4 November 2021 for three weeks the artwork Isatu at Rest in Cork (2021) will be presented on ten billboards across nine sites within Cork City.

As Alice Rekab states “Isatu at Rest in Cork (2021) and Isatu Chills (2021) in Dublin are reconfigurations of a digital drawing and collage I made using an image of my grandmother Isatu Kalokoh resting on her sofa playing Solitaire in her apartment in Freetown in the 1960s, this image is layered with a photograph of Sierra Leonean women carding cotton to make Country Cloth. Together this work is a meditation on feminised labour, domestic solitude, passing time, and rest as a form of resistance.”

Using an already socially-accepted visual form – such as the public billboard – allows Alice Rekab to subtly communicate to people outside of the gallery space, and within the environment of daily life in the city. These interventions centre around how Black-Irish experience of place can be shared and elevated through image-making and presentation. With a focus on bringing the artworks to areas where black and African diaspora communities make up significant portion of the audience demographic, creating moments of recognition and seeing oneself in places not usually allocated for that purpose.