On Belonging
3 - 27 June 2021
The Library Project, Temple Bar, Dublin 2
Bassam Al-Sabah, Moran Been-noon, Oscar Fouz Lopez, Maïa Nunes, Salvatore of Lucan and Osaro
Curated by Diana Bamimeke
Image: Still from How to Belong, Moran Been-noon 2020
Photo by Fiona Brennan
Left to right:
* Wide view of Fenced within the silent cold walls and Obsidian Black
* Moran Been-noon, How to Belong (2018 - 2021). Installation, video, performance
* (L - R) Oscar Fouz Lopez, Don't Look Back, Baby (2019), Oil on canvas. Salvatore of Lucan, McDonald's Lucan (2021), Oil on canvas.
* Bassam Al-Sabah, Fenced within the silent cold walls (2017). HD CGI film, 12 minutes 29 seconds
* Osaro, Obsidian Black (2021) Video, performance. 21 minutes 22 seconds. Performers - Alessandra Azevedo, Dearbhla Beirne, Karen Miano & Osaro
* Maïa Nunes, This Sorrow (2021), sound piece cover art. Sound design, OB6, mixing & mastering by Rory White
* Moran Been-noon, Detail from How to Belong
Photos by Kate-Bowe O’Brien
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Basic Space Dublin x The Library Project
On Belonging
3 - 27 June 2021
Basic Space Dublin and The Library Project are pleased to present On Belonging, a collaborative group exhibition guest curated by Diana Bamimeke. It presents new and existing work by Bassam Al-Sabah, Maïa Nunes, Moran Been-noon, Osaro, Oscar Fouz Lopez, and Salvatore of Lucan.
Each of the exhibiting artists have been invited to respond not only to the state of belonging - how it is conceived and made physical - but conversely, to not-belonging, and the outcomes of both in the modern world. Across multiple media, including installation, moving image and painting, these artists - all of whom hail from different ethnic backgrounds - articulate belonging in contemporary Ireland, in dreamscapes, and in digital hinterlands.
The COVID-19 pandemic undoubtedly brought practical challenges for the endeavours of arts & culture workers, not least for this exhibition, initially programmed for May 2020. More pressingly, however, the past year’s raft of social unrest has also had a marked conceptual impact. The police killings of George Floyd and of George Nkencho in the USA and Ireland respectively & the subsequent Black Lives Matter demonstrations; the widening of already profound global wealth inequality; and the mounting climate emergency recast the question of this exhibition as an urgent, critical enquiry. Each artist’s response has taken on a weightier meaning in present conditions, and form part of an exhibition that has changed in tandem with these landmark socio-political events.
These works invite the viewer to construct their own understanding of belonging, outside of its state definitions or socially prescribed understandings, which, if not entirely inflexible, undergo glacial changes spanning lifetimes. They explore a new, liberatory type of belonging that favours possibilities over established certainties; one which the feminist scholar Aimee Carrillo Rowe terms a “movement in the direction of the other: bodies in motion, encountering their own transition, their potential to vary.”
An online talks programme will accompany the exhibition - more details to follow
Basic Space Dublin would like to thank the Library Project for their support. On Belonging is supported by the Arts Council of Ireland.
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BIOGRAPHIES
OSARO
Osaro is a performance artist-in-training, storyteller and community-based curator, who showcased the award-winning event ‘Black Jam’ at the Abbey Theatre, in collaboration with Dublin Fringe Festival 2019. Her previous performances have dealt with the themes of the Old World and the orishas of Yoruba culture.
OSCAR FOUZ LOPEZ
Oscar Fouz Lopez is a Spanish artist that is based in Dublin. Lopez has had his work featured in solo exhibitions such as Don’t Look Back, Baby, Molesworth Gallery, 2020, and Pickled Chimp Ears, Pallas Projects, 2018. Lopez graduated with an MFA from NCAD in 2016 and was the Tony O’Malley Artist-in-Residence for 2018/19.
MORAN BEEN-NOON
Moran Been-noon is a Dublin-based visual artist, independent curator, and writer. Her artwork predominantly includes moving image installations, with a subject matter focus on political identity and post-migration living. Recent work involves exploring physical manipulations of voice, skin, and landscapes, and examines our desire to belong as well as questions of foreignness.
BASSAM AL-SABAH
Bassam Al-Sabah is an interdisciplinary artist working across film, painting, sculpture and printed matter. Solo shows include Eight Gallery (2017), The LAB (2018), and Solstice Arts Centre (2019). His work has been exhibited at the RHA, IMMA and Tulca in group shows, and his work is in the Arts Council Collection.
SALVATORE OF LUCAN
Salvatore of Lucan is a painter. Through his large-scale works he attempts to communicate clearly a sense of the world he inhabits, that is both tangible and emotional. Exploring home, identity and relationships, he creates expansive domestic scenes where realism meets the uncanny, and the familiar broaches the magical.
MAΪA NUNES
Maïa Nunes is a performance artist of Irish-Trinidadian descent. Their performance practice explores ambiguity as the site of transformative potential, ritual as healing for the Afro-diaspora, and song as liberation practice. This work so far includes three major performance projects: performance series WISH, WAYS TO LOVE ME, and INCANTATION, presented at Dublin Fringe Festival 2019.
DIANA BAMIMEKE
Diana Bamimeke is a writer and early-career independent curator from Dublin 15. An alumnus of IMMA After, their writing credits include the VAI News Sheet, the IMMA Magazine and joint publications by the RHA and Temple Bar Gallery + Studios. This is the second of Bamimeke’s curatorial endeavours, the first being HEED OFFICE, a collaborative arts advocacy project.
Diana Bamimeke
Four Negotiations
In response to On Belonging, for Basic Space Dublin
1.
This house was an elegy. It was a monument to grief in the most pervasive way. There is the old belief that animals and children can sense evil, cleaved to by generations of the faithful. And yet, in the vicinity of this house, this ability was numbed. There was no perception of good or evil. There was only a vacuum where perception ought to be. This house sat unoccupied for years at the terminal of a cul-de-sac. It was neighbourhood superstition that by this point the knotted mass of weeds in the lawn had gained new sentience and snaked their way indoors. That errant plant life now ruled the house’s interiors. A myth was built around this house and the myth did not let up. In fact, it swelled like a fatal surge, a heedless story that circumnavigated the world, finding translations in every language.
2.
SECULARCONFESSION-ADMITTWO-ONEFORYOU,ONEFORYOURPAIN - STEP INSIDE - LISTEN CLOSELY - SUBMIT THE HURT TO ELEMENTS OUTSIDE YOUR CONTROL - WHEN IT FEELS RIGHT, BEGIN TO TALK - SLOUGH IT ALL OFF - YES, ALL OF IT - EVEN THAT - REST NOW -PLUCKIT OFF YOUR PERSON - PILE HIGH THE GRIEF - SEE IT ACCUMULATE IN THE CORNER LIKE SO MUCH DEBRIS - THE JUNK OF ALL THE LIFE LIVED SO FAR - DID YOU THINK IT WOULD AMOUNT TO SO MUCH? - DO YOU EVEN RECOGNISE ALL OF IT? - KEEP TALKING - GO ON SO - THE CURTAIN IS DRAWN BEHIND YOU - NO ONE CAN HEAR - IT WILL COME OUT IN INNUMERABLE FORMS - LIKE MIST - LIKE RUBBLE - LIKE ACID - THIS BODY IS A FACTORY - ITS WASTE PRODUCTS NUMBER MANY - CORRECT DISPOSAL IS YOUR RESPONSIBILITY - THIS PLACE IS THE ONLY ETHICAL DUMPING GROUND
3.
The way I dug up the garden could be called a sort of crude botanical scrying. By strategically carving up the earth I could get at the truth that had eluded me for so many years. I started in the furthest left hand corner of the space and worked my way across diagonally. Up came budding tomato stalks, stubborn carrots and rainbow flower beds. Dashed aside they formed accidental horns of plenty, their masses leaving loamy stains against the wooden fence. Hours in, the soil around me was pockmarked with holes. The sky reddened, as if
embarrassed to see its friend suffer such indignity. I tilted my head up, cupped my mouth. “I have my reasons!” I shouted. Like in a film the only response I got was frightened flocks of birds tearing away from their branches. But I continued to dig. Abandoning my trowel in desperation I thrust my hands into the dirt looking for the answers, asking them to surface for me. Only worms and grey insects revealed themselves. More hours passed. A pit formed, a pit that ate the other little holes, and sure enough it took me. I tumbled in, falling so hard that I bloodied my knees against blunt rocks. But I continued to dig. Even when my sister and my niece found the cavernous mouth that had nearly consumed their entire back garden; even when they called my name and begged me to grab onto the firefighter’s rope; even when years slipped by and the hole had long been refilled and my obituary had been published despite my very much being alive, I continued to dig and dig and dig, compelled by pernicious instinct. I stopped only when my head broke ground, and I found myself crowned with weeds.
4.
After hours of waiting in the hard wooden seats, you decide to pee and stretch your legs. You pass the several numbered booths, a few of which have a bored employee stationed behind the protective glass. For every bored employee there is an exasperated customer brandishing a passport or a wretched looking student type on the brink of tears. You swing open the door of the women’s bathrooms and the radioactive blue light drenches you. You haven’t been the same ever since you read that the light is used to reveal drug residue in the stalls and nab users. It might not even be true, but it influences your decision regardless, and you settle on the most innocuous looking toilet. While you sit you thumb through your phone. Absentmindedly, you open your banking app. €300.00. It is still there. In less than an hour, this sum will have disappeared. At times it doesn’t seem worth it, and it feels foolish, to make the sorry pilgrimage to the GNIB yearly and come out poorer than you came in. You tap your foot to the sound of a leaky tap but the percussion is muffled by the trousers round your ankles. In your head you try to calculate how many hours of your life are about to pay for you not to be deported from your home. But you’ve never excelled at mental maths, so your phone does the calculating for you. 29.7029703, the screen responds dutifully.
The stool in booth number seven equals the rows of seats in hardness, if not outstrips them entirely. You wonder if this is a plot by the Department of Justice to make their facilities as inhospitable as possible to deter people from renewing their residence permits. The thought is short-lived because it is interrupted by the attendant who has finished examining your passport. Po-faced, she slides it back to you through the metal opening and motions towards the card reader.
You know the drill. The reader beeps for a successful transaction and without looking away from her computer monitor the attendant says, “Card’ll be posted out to you.” You hazard a goodbye, but there is no response.
For further information, please email basicspacedublin@gmail.com
