As part of our Response Series Musician Alon Benjamini has created the musical piece Golden Retriever: A musical response to Uri Aran’s exhibition Take This Dog for Example. In this new composition, certain parts are directly influenced by specific pieces within the exhibition, while others are inspired by the emotions and visions evoked by the exhibition as a […]

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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The Douglas Hyde is delighted to present a walk through of the exhibition The Rise and The Fall where artist Liz Magor and our Director, Dr Georgina Jackson, will discuss some of the themes, subject matter, histories and ideas of the work on show. The event is free and everybody is welcomed, but booking is […]

Participants in this interactive Animation Lab will use their imaginations to discuss and visually explore the nature of memory. The lab will consider questions like: What is memory? How does memory change over time? What about memory is special? Participants will create their own creative responses to these ideas through animation. The Animation Lab is […]

In this lab, participants will experience sound in its different forms and reflect on the emotional responses that sound provokes. Daranijoh Sunni (E the Artist) will create and isolate different sounds and vibrations for participants to experience – and then ask them to think about and discuss the feelings, emotions, and responses they have to […]

Dr Georgina Jackson, Director of The Douglas Hyde, will lead a tour of the current exhibition by Uri Aran, Take This Dog for Example. Comprising a series of sculptures, video and photographic works, this is Aran’s first institutional exhibition in Ireland. Through his work, Aran explores the basics of language, behaviour, perception, and the rules […]
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