Living Conditions
Presenting film screenings, new work, and a panel discussion, Living Conditions explored the built environment as both a symptom and product of the neoliberal systems we are conditioned to accept. This event was developed by Niamh Darling, Provost’s Fellow in Curating 2024 at The Douglas Hyde.
Opening times
In response to the ongoing, decade-long Irish housing crisis, the programme interrogates the possibility of building a ‘good life’ under the contingency of the free market. Considering housing precarity, the erosion of third spaces, and the deterioration of public infrastructures, Living Conditions traces the systemic crisis embedded into the architecture of our everyday. The programme brings together works that examine both the material conditions and affective registers produced by systemic crisis, ultimately tapping into the potential for carving out alternative spaces in the built environment.
Opening the programme, artist Evan Kelly read his newly-commissioned text, City Seconds (2025), speaking directly to current spatial politics in Ireland, and in particular Dublin. Through the text, Kelly reflects on the limits and controls imposed on our access to space in a city overrun by vacancy, dereliction and private development. Drawing on the writings of philosopher and cultural critic Walter Benjamin (1892-1940), Kelly explores his concept of jetztzeit – a time that is ripe with revolutionary possibility. Amidst the capital’s tangible and affective precarity, City Seconds is a call to action, considering Dublin as a city on the brink of generative transformation.
Delving into the world of private development, Rope (2022) by Eva Richardson McCrea examines speculative processes of urban ‘regeneration’ and their severance from public life. A work of fiction, the film observes three property developers as they casually discuss their business ventures over a meal in a vacant building. Inspired by narrative devices in Alfred Hitchcock’s film Rope (1948), the work’s dialogue melds improvisation with writing and interviews by contemporary champions of gentrification such as urban theorist Richard Florida, Patrick Schumacher of Zaha Hadid Architects and Daniel Doctoroff, former CEO of Sidewalk Labs (Google’s ‘smart cities’ start-up). An exploration of diffusive modes of power, the work examines how small talk in smaller circles can shape the cityscape and decide the living situations for thousands.
Moving from the cityscape to the domestic sphere, and from developer to tenant, GOT DAMP (2023) by Avril Corroon explores the home as both a space of intimate care and systemic neglect. The video work is the culmination of Corroon’s two-year project of the same name which saw the artist trade energy-efficient dehumidifiers with tenants across London and Dublin in exchange for their collected damp.
Contemplating modes of protection and exposure, Corroon’s use of thermal camera footage preserves the tenants’ anonymity while alluding to surveillance to convey the alienating condition of life under capitalism. The work captures the tenants’ daily routines of collecting and battling the damp in their homes, considering processes of both adapting to, and resisting, deteriorating living conditions.
Forming the backdrop to this event, there was a new sound installation by Avril Corroon, Liquid Breath (2025). Suspended from the ceiling of Gallery 1, a catheter bag releases liquid drip by drip into a bucket below, paced by a programmed motor. Following a composition developed by the artist, the rhythm of the drops plays with the idea of white noise to both elicit and disturb the incremental, discrete force of slow violence. Corroon appropriates damp reserved from her previous project GOT DAMP (2023) to reflect on the declining systems and infrastructures intended to support life.
Bringing together artists and works that magnify or resist the current operational modes of precarity, this event interrogates the damaging systems that shape our living spaces, while considering new ways to move forward.
15:00 – 15:15 | Reading
Welcome by Dr Georgina Jackson and Niamh Darling.
Evan Kelly, City Seconds (2025), text
15:15 – 16:00 | Screenings
Eva George Richardson McCrea, Rope (2022), single channel video, 15mins
Avril Corroon, GOT DAMP (2023), single channel video, 30mins
16:00 – 16:45 | Panel Discussion, Q&A
Speakers Avril Corroon (Artist), Clodagh Emoe (Artist), Evan Kelly (Artist/Activist), Eva George Richardson McCrea (Artist). Moderated by Niamh Darling.
15:00 – 17:00 | Artwork
Avril Corroon, Liquid Breath, 2025, catheter bag, damp, metal bucket. Site-specific instal- lation, Gallery 1 of The Douglas Hyde.
Avril Corroon is a visual artist from County Westmeath working with sculpture, video, performance and social practice to examine inequity and how architecture manifests governance. Her recent project Got Damp (2023) worked with members of Community Action Tenants Union and tenants with damp issues in Dublin and London to create an exchange system harvesting damp, collecting stories, circulating evidence, a publication, and fees. Got Damp was commissioned and exhibited by TACO, London, and Project Arts Centre, Dublin. Corroon received a BA from the National College of Art and Design in Fine Art Media in 2014 and a Masters in Fine Art at Goldsmiths University, London in 2019. She is currently a resident at the Rijksakademie Van Beeldende Kunsten in the Netherlands.
Clodagh Emoe describes her art practice as an embodied enquiry. For over twenty years her practice has explored the spatial and temporal dimensions of liminality; as a threshold space and state. Her work is often site-specific and underpinned by ritual, creating spaces where tacit knowledge can flourish and thought may be ‘felt’. Clodagh’s work has been commissioned by the Irish Museum of Modern Art; VISUAL; Centre for Contemporary Art; The Model; Hugh Lane Municipal Gallery; Project Arts Centre; Serpentine Gallery, London; documenta XIII, Kassel; Taipei Biennial; National Museum of Contemporary Art, Seoul; Nýló, The Living Art Museum, Reykjavik. Clodagh is currently a member of Temple Bar Gallery and Studios.
Niamh Darling is the Provost’s Fellow in Curating 2024 at The Douglas Hyde where she has worked closely on new commissions, exhibitions and engagement events. She initiated and leads a monthly reading group on ‘Property’ and was editor of Worlding, a commissioned publication featuring new work and text by the Student Forum 2024. Niamh holds a BA(Hons) in Art History and English from Trinity College Dublin and an MA in Arts and Culture: Art History from Leiden University, where she completed her thesis on housing precarity in the work of contemporary Irish artists Eimear Walshe and Avril Corroon. Her writing has been published by Paper Visual Art and The Visual Artist’s New Sheet.
Evan Kelly is an artist whose work looks at environments – urban, natural and social – and charts how collective life enacts changes on these terrains, and is in turn changed by them. Exploring both collective and individual responses to changing spaces, he works across a variety of disciplines including videography, bookmaking, photography and expanded cinema. Using cinema as a tool of spatial reclamation, his recent and ongoing project, Rupture Cinema, stages radical film screenings in vacant buildings and underutilised public spaces. Evan holds a BA in Fine Art Media from the National College of Art and Design.
Working across video, sculpture and photography and borrowing conventions from cinema, theatre and television, Eva Richardson McCrea’s practice takes specific sites as points of departure to explore the politics of the built environment and relations between architecture and daily life in the production of contemporary subjectivities. Forthcoming and recent exhibitions & screenings include; Project Arts Centre, Dublin, IRE (2025); The Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, Connecticut, USA (2024); Containerakademiet, Copenhagen, DK (2024); Composite, Melbourne, AUS (2024); Laden, Berlin, DE (2024). She studied at Städelschule, Frankfurt am Main; CRMEP, Kingston University, London; and NCAD, Dublin. She is supported by the Arts Council of Ireland.
Avril Corroon, Got Damp (2023), film stills. Courtesy of the artist.
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