The Douglas Hyde is delighted to present a new music session where artist Bill Harris will host an experimental electronic dance night as part of our First Thursday series. Through this new series of late openings, the gallery becomes a space for hosting unexpected, experimental practices across multiple artforms from live music and expanded cinema […]

Salma Ahmad Caller
Shell Fables ~ a Curious Cabinet of Beings & Becoming
The Douglas Hyde is delighted to present the ninth of the screenings of Art from the African Diaspora as part of Alice Rekab’s multi-platform project FAMILY LINES: Shell Fables ~ a Curious Cabinet of Beings & Becoming by Salma Ahmad Caller (2022).
This seventeen minute film is Salma Ahmad Caller’s first film, a prototype, curating her mixed-race identity as curiosity. It is a continuation of her art practice working with personal family archives of photographs and things. These curious Things survived decades of her English mother and Egyptian father’s lives, from Oxford in the 1960s to Cairo where her older sister Hala was born, to Mosul where she was born in 1969, and on to a childhood in Kano, Nigeria, and teenage years in Jeddah and Riyadh in the 1980s. Juxtaposing things that seem to belong to ‘opposing’ cultures creates strangeness and blurs boundaries. These Things are also witnesses to strange and forbidden encounters across divides created by ideologies, imagined and constructed difference, power and desire. The currents of Orientalism, colonialism and Empire moved these small Things in unexpected ways.
Aiming to platform the voices of Black artists and artists of colour, and to represent intergenerational legacies of self-representation in the production of film, writing and visual art, Alice Rekab and The Douglas Hyde have invited Salma Ahmad Caller to co-curate the screening series by selecting a film that has influenced and/or inspired her. Ahmad Caller has selected to screen the film The Night of Counting The Years (1969) directed by Shadi Abdel Salam. The Night of Counting The Years will be screened online next month from 7 – 21 July.
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Upcoming Events

The Douglas Hyde is delighted to present a new music session with music assemble Kirkos as part of our First Thursday series. Through this new series of late openings, the gallery becomes a space for hosting unexpected, experimental practices across multiple artforms from live music and expanded cinema to performance and spoken word. Join us each […]

The Douglas Hyde is delighted to present a new performance by artist Isadora Epstein as part of our First Thursday series. Through this new series of late openings, the gallery becomes a space for hosting unexpected, experimental practices across multiple artforms from live music and expanded cinema to performance and spoken word. Join us each First […]

The Douglas Hyde is delighted to share details of this upcoming talk by Dr John Bosco Conama on the history of Irish Sign Language in the context of Amanda Coogan’s Freude! Freude! project. Booking required. Please use the link on this page to book your place.

The Douglas Hyde is delighted to present an Artist Talk where artist Amanda Coogan will be joined in conversation by Dr Georgina Jackson, Director at The Douglas Hyde, to discuss the many aspects of Coogan’s Freude! Freude! project. Booking required. Please use the link on this page to book your place.

Open House is an annual three-day festival of architecture, opening up usually inaccessible architectural treasures to the public with a programme of tours and talks. A renowned example of Brutalist architecture, The Douglas Hyde Gallery will participate in Open House 2023 with a series of tours. Join us on 14 and 15 October 2023 for […]
Artists present us with new perspectives on the world we live in. Explore the exciting ideas behind our programmes, hear more from the artists we work with and discover new ways of engaging with art.